


Strange Days

by DesdemonaKaylose, Stomiidae



Series: Strange Days at Black Hole High [1]
Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Ensemble Cast, F/M, M/M, Medical Jargon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-14
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 02:56:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2452124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesdemonaKaylose/pseuds/DesdemonaKaylose, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stomiidae/pseuds/Stomiidae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jimmy has been eyeing that spot at the lunch table for years now, and he just knows he's gonna make the cut sooner or later. It has not occurred to him that a bunch of violent, irritable misfits might be carting around more drama than he is equipped to handle.</p><p>What? How bad could it be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a chaptered fic I've been working on with Stomiidae for a month or so. We're planning four or five chapters, with future chapters spending a little more time on people who aren't Jimmy. He seemed like a good vehicle of entry, but his plot isn't the only plot.

There are three kinds of students: ones who put up with school until that promised day of freedom, ones who generally don’t mind the whole business, and ones who have gone so completely off the reservation that it’s hard to call them students at all, at any meaningful use of the term.

Jimmy was, as such stories go, the latter.

It was a Tuesday afternoon of no particular note, except that Jimmy had for once arrived on time and was expected to leave on time as well. It was geometry class. His cheek had been pushed up on one hand to such a grotesque point that he appeared to have no eye socket to speak of, and he was idly engaged in the task of carving phallic symbols into the desk top with an illegal penknife.

Jimmy liked to think of himself as a bit of a badass.

They’d graduated from talking about triangles to talking about the daunting and esoteric topic of dodecahedrons today, which was a bit of a problem since he’d missed all of the prior triangle days and was still blurry about the whole topic of angles in general, tri or otherwise.

He finished one obscene symbol and, wrinkling his nose, carved an uncertain triangle into the fake wood. Now, the angles were here, here, and here, he knew that, but how did you know the little numbers that went with them without physically pulling out one of those mortifying plastic doohickies to measure it?

After a moment of sullen contemplation, he carved question marks at each vertex and a bigger _how???_ into the surface beside them.

 He considered his handiwork for a moment before shrugging, quietly setting aside the excess of enthusiasm for maths, and single-mindedly returning to the rote inscription of dicks. The day passed, and the equation was forgotten.

By a miracle of bus routes, parental avoidance, and astoundingly good weather, Jimmy happened to be in school two days in a row. He stumbled into the geometry room again, a day later, trying to shake off the wad of gum someone had deliberately spit into his path, and fell into the only open seat available. Possibly because of its age, or model, or the fact that it had recently been laboriously sculpted into a bas-relief of human genitalia, this turned out to be the same seat as the day before. Jimmy dropped his bag with its single underfed binder into the walkway between desks, dug for his pen knife, and came up instead with a pencil he’d found on the floor a month ago. Was the knife still in his locker? He’d managed not to get kicked out of school so far just by sheer dint of being beneath faculty notice, but if they did one of those randomized searches while that was in his stuff, there wouldn’t be any more skating under the radar.

He was contemplating this when he noticed the graffiti. It was small, pencil lead, across the top of his desk, and it started just below the one word he’d carved before. He squinted down at it, trying to make out the cramped but utilitarian style.

 _You don’t start from nothing_ , it said. _They give you the first number & you work out the rest so they total 180._

 Somebody was trying to teach him math. Unless they were just making fun of him, which was always a possibility. He chewed his pencil uncertainly. On the one hand, math was a tool of the bourgeoisie to build up impossible ideals of intellectual success in order to crush the proletariat under their elitist heels. On the other hand, the fact that he couldn’t understand a goddamn triangle _really fucking smarted._

He drew a 90 on two of the angles, tapped the desk, and finally left an irritated underline at the third angle’s question mark.

-x-

_No, split it three ways if you’re going to do that_

_60 60 60??_

_Sure_

_90 45 45_

_Yes actually_

_U some kinda nerd?_

_That’s an awfully rude question to ask a person_

_Nerd_

_Nerd_

_Hey nerd_

_Come on I’m sorry this class is dead boring talk 2 me_

_My name isn’t nerd_

_Ok whats ur name poindexter_

_Edgar_

_What kinda name is that were u born 200 years ago_

_Cause I mean if u were a vampire or something that would be p fuckin sweet_

_If I were a vampire why would I be in highschool?_

_2 lure cool kids into the sultry embrace of death_

_That sounds like the least useful thing I could possibly do with my afterlife_

_Did you skip class today? There’s a test Monday, you’re not going to be well prepared_

_Relax poindexter I won’t pass either way_

_~~You can~~ ~~Just~~ 2:30 library don’t be late_

-x-

Jimmy was not comfortable in libraries.

That many books in one room made his skin crawl, and the librarians. Oh the librarians. Evil dictators of the literary world. Can’t chew gum, can’t rearrange the books, can’t smoke behind the stacks, what a bunch of effin witches.

He eyed the front desk and its resident harpy distastefully. The old woman returned his a baleful look. Jimmy sniffed haughtily and strode past her, but before he could round the corner to the tables beyond she called out to him.

“I hope I don’t catch you lighting up them cigarettes, young man,” she said, voice menacingly soft but still perfectly intelligible in the unnatural quiet of the library. “If I do I’ll have to ban you again.”

Jimmy felt a cold shiver run down his spine but rallied his courage. He wasn’t gonna let some old bitch get the better of him, even if she did look like a sinister guardian from the seventh Circle of Hell.

“I’ll have you know I’m here for legitimate scholastic purposes,” he snapped. He stalked off, quietly adding, “ _bitch,”_ when he was sure he was far enough away to escape notice.

“Alright, _dearie_ , just let me know if you need help finding anything.” Her voice floated ominously after him. Jimmy flinched. He couldn’t help it. She’d probably heard that last part too. She’d be watching him, strolling with her little squeaky cart along his peripheral just to psyche him out. Like a shark she’d circle, peering at him through the books. Creepy-ass bitch.

He pushed on. The more distance between that front desk and him, the better. The library was mostly empty, he noted, except for that one corner where somebody was hunched over a table. That ought to make his mysterious tutor easier to find, unless of course he’d just been outright ditched in which case he was gonna—why, he’d just—well he would be mad as hell, anyways.

He took a closer scan of the place. It wasn’t all that big. Nobody but him, the librarian, and whoever it was over there with the undercut up in the corner—

He hopped up a couple times, trying to get a better look. Was that who he thought it was? Oh sweet merciful antichrist it was, it totally was. Jimmy grinned a positively Jurassic grin and set course for the corner.

“Heeeey, uh, you,” he called, throwing his bag up the stairs as he went. It landed in an empty chair, swoosh, goal, nothing but net. “You’re Nny’s friend aren’t you?”

The boy looked up. He was an unassuming upperclassman with a long face and wire-rimmed glasses, but Jimmy knew that behind that ordinary appearance was the heart of a stone-cold killer. Had to be. Birds of a feather, right?

The guy narrowed his eyes—it wasn’t exactly a cold expression, but it was shrewd. He closed his book. “I assume you’re talking about Johnny.”

“Right, right,” Jimmy said, “but _you_ call him Nny.”

“At his request.”

“So you _are_ his friend.”

“Yes,” Edgar said, “and you’re the chronic eavesdropper from the cafeteria.”

Jimmy examined his nails modestly. It was nice to have your efforts appreciated. “So,” he said, “you, uh, you’re into all that book stuff?”

“Sometimes.”

“Huh. Did not expect Nny’s buddy to be a geek.”

The guy raised his brows. “I have a name, you know.”

“Yeah?”

The guy looked at him for a long moment, like he was trying to riddle out the punch line of the joke, and then his whole expression sagged into something halfway between a smile and a grimace. He dropped his cheek into one hand, offered the other in a handshake. “I’m _Edgar_ ,” he said, “Edgar _Vargas_.”

Jimmy briefly imagined himself as a shaken can of soda blasting its cap off in a foam of frothy overload. Metaphorically, he busted a cap. This metaphor was appropriate on multiple levels.

“Oh,” he said. “Cool.”

He grabbed Edgar’s outstretched hand and shook it like an earthquake shaking a china shop. He didn’t let go until Edgar firmly grabbed his wrist and lifted him off. Jimmy leaned in as close as he could manage and tried for a conspiratory grin. “How’s the bomb coming along?”

Edgar betrayed absolutely no flicker of recognition. What a stone cold _boss_. “…Excuse me?”

Jimmy bit his lip. “No, no, it’s cool, I shouldn’t have asked, right, you don’t know if you can trust me yet.”

Edgar blinked a couple times. “I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t require your nose to touch mine.”

Jimmy reeled back and topped into a chair on his side of the table. “Don’t worry, I am a secret keeper extraordinaire, subtlety is my middle name, I know when to stop!”

“I seriously doubt that,” Edgar observed. “Has anyone ever told you that you come on awfully strong?”

“Just,” Jimmy carried on, leaning in again—less this time, “whenever you’re ready to trust me, I will be _so_ ready and waiting.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Now, I’m pretty sure we came here for a reason…?”

“Right.” Jimmy sat back, sheepish.

“Good. So let me just show you a couple practice problems—”

“Does he ever talk about me?”

 Edgar looked up from his binder, startled. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Nny, does he ever talk about me.”

The upperclassman made absolutely no expression for the better part of a minute. Finally, he replied, “Honestly, I’m not sure he knows you exist.”

Jimmy’s stomach dropped. _Impossible_. “Pre-school camp?” he demanded. “1995? We had the same bus home for three years.”

“Mmm,” Edgar said, “no, don’t think so.”

Impossible. Sure, maybe they weren’t officially _friends_ yet, but Johnny was the only person in the whole world who was capable of understanding the complex, delicate layers of Jimmy’s blackened soul. That was fucking _destiny_ , man, that’s got to count for something.

“He probably just doesn’t want to make you jealous,” Jimmy said, after a moment. He smiled. “We’re soul mates, you know.”

Edgar pushed a worksheet across the table. “I’m beginning to regret this already.”

-x-

Jimmy skidded into the cafeteria, elated at the prospect of finally being able to sit in _the seat._ He paused at the door, and craned his head above the general chaos until he spotted Edgar and waved. His time had come.

Edgar did a double take, glanced around a bit before waving back, hesitant and narrow-eyed. If it were anyone but Edgar, Jimmy would have been insulted. Jimmy basically lived in a whirling whirlpool of dismissal, and after getting it from all sides day in and out you started to really hate that kinda shit. But Edgar was a nerd, or at least had nerd-like tendencies, and nerds were shy, right?

He darted between the students leaving the chaos of the immediate area around the cafeteria entrance, zeroing in on Edgar and —YEP— there was Johnny! Anticipation bubbled in his gut until it was a churning vortex of terror and absolute joy.

Nny was hunched over the table, scribbling on some paper. Jimmy slid into the seat diagonal from him, to the immediate left of Edgar. He’d been eyeing this chair for the last year and a half, to sit so close! Jimmy was jittery with excitement. Across from him Johnny – **THE** JOHNNY—was focused on what he was writing…  Jimmy leaned forward across the table to take a look, the edge digging into his stomach. Beside him Edgar sighed.

“Jimmy, how did those problems last night go?” His tone was carefully neutral, face impassive. “Was there something on the worksheet you wanted to ask about?”

“Nah, I didn’t finish them.” It looked like a list of some sort, or a set of instructions. He contemplated what deliciously dark things Johnny may have been listing when it occurred to him that it may not be the best idea to write off Edgar, his ticket to the table he’d been dreaming of sitting at for so long. He pulled back from trying to decipher Johnny’s scrawl and looked over at Edgar. “I mean, I talked to Mr. Mendoza and told him I was getting help on the work and he gave me an extra day to finish.” It was a lie that he carefully metered with a half innocent, half bored expression. Worked on all his teachers, when they took the time to hound him about finishing assignments, which was almost never.

“Oh,” was all Edgar said. He turned in his seat and faced Nny. Jimmy would have felt offended but, again, Edgar was a nerd, and nerds had ADD, right? He was probably just distracted. Classic nerd.

“I’m going to get my prescription updated after school on Friday. Do you want to come?”

Jimmy smirked, amused at what he assumed was code-speak for one of their super secret meetings. He wondered if prescription was the secret word for a special bomb formula, or mustard gas cocktail. Oh wow, he was with the top dogs now!

“I’ve got shit to do.” Johnny muttered distractedly. Jimmy felt a delightful shiver at the sound of his voice. His old seat meant he could only hear Nny’s voice when he was mid-rant. He huddled closer, curious once again about the mess of papers that were crinkling under his arm as he wrote furiously.

“Well, I just thought I’d ask,” Edgar leaned over the table and ducked his head until he caught Nny’s eye with a sardonic little smile. “I’d hate for you to feel left out.”

He would’ve been offended on Johnny’s behalf if the guy himself had not just noticed Jimmy was at the table and reacted rather unfavorably. He pushed back away from Edgar and Jimmy, who were both leaning uncomfortably close to his face.

“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded. He looked over at Edgar whose head had dropped to the table with a breathy chuckle. Jimmy felt his scraped up wad of happiness drop into his stomach like a brick.

“He’s been sitting here for nearly a full two minutes,” Edgar said, voice muffled, “and you just now noticed.”

“Who the fuck is he?” Johnny pointed one of his skinny fingers at Jimmy’s forehead. If Jimmy leaned forward just a little more they’d be touching.

“This,” Edgar put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder to stop him from trying to impale his head on Johnny’s hand, “is Jimmy. We met in the Library.” Edgar ticked an eyebrow at the tiny angry hiss Jimmy leveled towards his hand.

“I am _such_ a major fan,” Jimmy said, shrugging the hand off.

“Of _what_?”

“Well, of… you.”

Johnny turned a face white hot with murder on Edgar. “What the deep fried fuck did you bring to our table, Vargas?”

“I was there that one time you pounded the football guy into hamburger meat,” Jimmy carried on, “Oh, oh, and I saw the chair fight last month, that was really something else.”

Johnny’s stare at Edgar hardened.

A black girl with a series of mismatching band aids across her fingers dropped down onto a seat at the far end of the table. She looked curiously back and forth between the two sides.

“Soooooo,” she said, “who’s the white boy?”

“White boy?” Jimmy echoed, breaking concentration. He sat back, squinting at her.

Johnny sniffed. “Some braindead jerkoff Edgar invited over.”

“What do you mean _white boy_?”

“Look, I didn’t invite him, he invited himself. There’s not exactly a security gate around the table.”

“It’s not like I’m the only white guy—”

“I don’t care who the fuck invited him, I want him gone!”

“Eric is—wait, no, he’s Mexican.”

 “Nny, you’re breaking your spoon.”

“What about David, he’s—no, shit, he’s from southside.”

“I’m giving you fuckheads the count of ten before I break this guy’s nose.”

“Holy shit,” Jimmy said, staring out into the crowded cafeteria, “I’m the only white person in this school.”

Another tray dropped onto the table, followed by a narrow-eyed girl with a smudge of paint across her cheek. “Who’s having the existential crisis today?” she asked, nodding towards Jimmy.

Her friends threw up their arms, exasperated. Jimmy leaned across the table and shook her hand with only slightly too much force. “I’m Jimmy,” he said. He smiled. He continued smiling, teeth locked together, even as he added, “and I’m watching you.”

 “Ohhh kay,” the girl said. She stood up again, picked up her tray, and stepped back over the bench. “I’m going back to the art room. I can’t handle this today.”

Johnny whirled in his seat, snatching up his own tray and lifting it like a club. The second the girl had disappeared into the crowd, he fixed his bloody-eyed glare on Jimmy. Jimmy's heart stuttered. Holy _damn_ he was intense in person, like a storm system locked in a flesh prison, like a force of nature winding back a low-budget lunch tray and aiming it corners forward.

“You,” he hissed, “are on my shit list, kid.”

The sound of tray colliding with human bones could barely have been heard at the other end of the cafeteria.

-x-

Jimmy did not skip school the next day. Jimmy showed up to class with a black eye and a swath of bandage around both of his hands, looking about as happy as anyone had ever seen him. The general consensus was that it was kind of eerie, and so for most of his classes that day there was at least one empty seat next to whichever one he had picked.

Jimmy sat down at Johnny’s table, again, and made cheerful conversation with anyone who would listen. Johnny and Edgar stared at him in total silence for a long time. He spent ten minutes explaining to Tenna that the world was a hologram run by lizard people and a secret compendium of tyrannical matriarchs. She was pretty into it. He could tell.

Finally Johnny turned to Edgar. “You befriended Lassie from Hell.”

Edgar shrugged. “He certainly does bounce back.”

“He gives me a fucking headache!”

Edgar propped his chin up on one fist. “I kind of like him.”

Johnny scowled and jerked his fist involuntarily. His plastic fork was wedged so far into his plate it was scraping the metal tray underneath. “What. The hell.”

“Oh come on,” Edgar said. “Look, he’s just like you were. You went through that, what, _reptile kings_ phase in eighth grade.”

Johnny reeled back.

“And you _still_ think the universe is a hologram.”

“It’s a simulation,” Johnny snapped. “There is a _huge_ difference.”

“Oh yeah. You are nothing alike.”

-x-

“So!” Jimmy said, “what was your hazing like?”

Edgar looked up from the contents of his backpack, which he’d been rifling through determinately for the last few minutes. They were at the junior parking bowl, on the edge of the asphalt, while Edgar looked for his keys in the multiplicative pockets of his backpack.

“My what?” he replied.

Jimmy pointed to his swollen black eye, which was against all odds even worse than it had been the day before. “You know, your intro to the club.”

“That wasn’t—” Edgar started, and then seemed uneasy with prospect of finishing his sentence. “Oh look,” he said, instead, “found my keys.”

The keyring jingled faintly, swinging a little pewter cross from one loop.

“Johnny isn’t here yet,” Jimmy pointed out.

“He’s not coming,” Edgar replied, unlocking his battered minivan. It looked like it had been used to demolish a house at some point. “He never comes. Groceries aren’t interesting enough for him.”

“But I…” Jimmy said, “but… you invited him.”

Edgar tossed his backpack into the seat behind him and managed to make the motion look more like a shrug than ought to have been possible. “He just likes to be invited to things. If you try to do something without telling him, he’ll show up out of nowhere to spite you. Best way to get him out of your hair is to tell him exactly what you’re planning in mind numbing detail. You coming?”

A blue beetlebug zoomed past them on its way to temporary scholastic freedom. Jimmy hesitated briefly, and then sullenly loaded up into the passenger seat. He threw his underfed bag into the back seat and ignored the sound of something crunching.

“This was going to be our first time hanging out,” he mumbled.

Edgar glanced over at him for just the flicker of a second before returning his attention to the vehicle. “Don’t get so down. You’ll have plenty of other chances to be snubbed by Johnny before the year's out.”

Jimmy sniffed. “I had this whole story worked up to tell him.”

A truck punched past the nose of the minivan so fast it could have been rocket propelled.

“What,” Edgar said, preoccupied with getting out of the parking lot in one piece, “you were gonna read him Nancy Drew?”

“ _No_. I got in a fight this weekend. I was gonna tell him about it.”

“A fight. You.”

“Yeah, _me_. You saying I don’t have what it takes?”

“Well…” Edgar shot him a look as they rolled to a stop at the parking lot exit. “Mostly you just seem to talk a lot.”

“I did get in a fight!”

“Did you win?”

Jimmy sucked his bottom lip. “Not… exactly. But winning isn’t the point! Johnny never worries about winning.”

“That’s because Johnny is a piece of mindless berserker trash,” Edgar replied, matter of fact. The car squealed into a precise left turn.

“What?”

“So,” Edgar pushed on, “who was this terribly formidable opponent?”

They grumbled into motion, coasting into the outside lane of the highway that ran around their school. Edgar drove precisely, more algorithm than driver. It was so exactly up to the prescribed vehicular law codes that it seemed to infuriate everyone else on the road into a horn blaring frenzy. Jimmy counted four people shooting them the bird.

“Oooh,” he said, “just this chick from my neighborhood.”

Edgar carefully slowed his car in preparation for a turn lane two intersections away. “Has anyone ever told you you’re not supposed to hit girls.”

Jimmy scowled. “That’s what the conspiracy of matriarchs _wants_ us to think. People like me, we know how the _real_ system works.”

 “Jimmy,” Edgar said, “you are less of a person and more of a conglomeration of terrible ideas loosely held together by sheer dumb determination.”

“Hey, can we stop at the burger place?”

“Sure, why not.”

-x-

Jimmy arrived at the lunch table just in time to see the painter girl slamming her tray onto the tabletop. She looked like she was about one fraying nerve away from flipping the whole thing over. Something told him that she could do it, too.

“What are you gonna do about it?” she was snarling, “Hit me?”

Johnny was sitting across from her, his eyes wide and—possibly—a little bit watery. “Devi,” he said, “You know I would never—”

“You already flipped out on me once, I’m not taking that chance again!”

“It wasn’t like that, I keep trying to—”

The girl slammed her fist onto the table top. It barely registered over the din of the cafeteria, hundreds of students chewing and messing around, but in the tense little bubble around their table it seemed to hang like the toll of a church bell in the air between them. Jimmy was a little fuzzy on her, to be honest. She’d been around, now and then, since the beginning of high school, but he’d been too distracted by Nny and he had never really stopped to give her any thought. After all, once Nny finally realized that they were soul mates she’d be yesterday’s news, right?

He was beginning to really wish he’d paid more attention when he had the chance.

“You’ve got _problems_ , Nny,” she snapped, “and maybe Vargas doesn’t care what kind of shit you pull, but I’m not going to sit by—”

Jimmy briefly considered coming to Johnny’s rescue, but the last time he’d gotten in the middle of Devi and Johnny he’d gotten a face full of tray, and he was slowly starting to figure out that irritating Devi in any way was a good way to get more of that. Johnny, apparently, did not want to be rescued. So he just tried to make himself as small as possible and took a seat next to Edgar, who was watching the proceedings with a detached kind of amusement.

“So, uh,” Jimmy said, “what’s going on?”

Edgar gestured lazily with his fork. “Johnny’s been stalking this one freshman kid for the last couple weeks. Devi caught wind of it.”

Ah. Events started to settle into a sort of comprehensible narrative. Jimmy nodded. “Right, right okay. Yeah, I get that. If I was dating Johnny and I caught him following around some other kid, I’d be pissed too.”

Edgar blinked. “That’s not what… Devi’s not _jealous_ , Jimmy.”

 “Oh." Events shattered. "Then what’s her _problem?”_

Edgar turned his attention back to the static center of the conflict. “The freshman kid is a little, hmmm, skittish? Devi’s worried he’s going to get hurt.”

A heavy _crack_ of tray on skull—intimately familiar by now—caused the two of them to spin back around to the center of the table. Devi had smashed her tray into Johnny’s head, and the two were frozen like a tableau across the top of the table; Johnny knocked down over the tabletop with one arm underneath him, Devi with one foot on the bench, breathing heavily.

“I’m leaving,” she said, at last. She dropped her tray onto Johnny’s head and stepped down from the bench. “Get your shit together before someone you care about gets hurt.”

She left Johnny, still frozen, on the tabletop like so much left over chicken dinner. Jimmy turned back to Edgar with as small motions as possible, so as to avoid drawing any attention to himself.

“What a crazy bitch,” he whispered.

“Well,” Edgar said, sipping his coke, “he probably was going to strangle her. That’s a pretty solid defense.”

Jimmy shot Johnny another look. That was his hero, now flipped over and lying across the table with a carton of milk in his hands, crying onto his bendy straw. He felt something in his gut puncture a little.

“He doesn’t look like he was…”

Edgar waved him off. “The rages come and go pretty fast. Maybe one day he _will_ kill one of us.” He seemed to contemplate this for a moment before adding, “Maybe it’ll be me.”

Jimmy frowned. Getting beat up a little was one thing, but _dying?_ Like, totally ceasing to exist? Not on his to-do list. “You… don’t mind?” he asked.

“Mmmph,” Edgar answered, shrugging.

Jimmy watched Edgar for a long time, after that, with an unsettled sensation that he was trying to parse an algebraic equation much too advanced for his paltry training.

-x-

The freshman was a little squirt of a thing, and as Jimmy slipped up behind him he was pretty sure he saw a teddy bear in the kid’s locker. He’d been tailing him for most of the morning, between classes, and not only was the hype not being lived up to, it was being downright bubble-wrapped and buried.

“Soooo,” he said, leaning over the kid’s shoulder, “you’re Nny’s pet project.”

The boy let out a squeak and clutched at the door to his locker like he was about to climb inside it and pull the door shut on himself. He didn’t turn around.

“Kinda scrawny,” Jimmy observed, wrinkling his nose. “Wimpy too. I guess you’re, what, like a fixer-upper?”

The kid let out a high-pitched whine like air escaping a tortured balloon.

“Well,” Jimmy carried on, cheerfully, “you just watch yourself buddy, ‘cause if you think I’m gonna let some scrawny little upstart ruin all my hard work you’ve got another thing coming.”

Jimmy paused. Another boy had appeared in his periphery, moving at if he were aiming for the center of this little orientation. Jimmy broke concentration on the squeaky one and turned his attention to the new one, who was walking with something of a modified stalk. He had one deeply disconcerting eye, pale blue in his otherwise dark face. His mismatched vision settled directly on Jimmy with all the malevolent interest of a butterfly collector on an insect. It had a force all its own. Jimmy found himself taking an unexpected step back.

“Who is bothering you, Todd?” the creepy one asked. He leaned in closer to Jimmy, practically over the hunched back of his friend, who only made a terrified unintelligible noise. He patted Todd on the shoulder without looking down. “Amigo, you have got to start using your words.”

Jimmy drew himself up. “I’m the _Darkness,”_ he announced, although he had only been toying with the nickname during an impromptu game of solo MASH last night. “Jimmy: your worst nightmare.”

 The kid lifted his eyebrows. His eyes were as pitiless and empty as the void of endless space. “Oh, a nightmare are you?”

Suddenly, Jimmy was a little less sure. “Um,” he said.

“I’m Pepito,” the kid went on, leaning still closer. He hadn’t blinked since he arrived. “This is my friend Todd, and you have not yet learned the rot licked from the mouth of nightmares, _amigo_.”

“ _Um_.”

Pepito grabbed him by the collar, still smiling. “Come near my friend again,” he said, “and I will feed you your own hands, _comprende_?”

Jimmy did not piss himself, but it was a pretty near thing.

-x-

Johnny left his house after barely an hour of fucking around the living room, gritting his teeth every time the phone started to ring. They were calling in droves the last couple days, two by the hour at least. She’d made him promise that he wouldn’t pick up the phone or unplug it. It wasn’t as if she answered them herself when she got home, so why the _fuck_ he couldn’t just unplug the thing while she was at her shift was a riddle for the ages. He’d tried to ask a couple times, but she just sighed and looked at him like she was one faulty heartbeat away from complete comatosis, and she’d said _“I’m tired.”_

He wasn’t so far gone that he was going to spend the one lousy hour a week he actually got to see his mother shouting about the god damn phone. Not yet.

Edgar’s house on the hill looked empty no matter what time he showed up, no matter how many thousands of times he’d walked up the sidewalk. No cars in the driveway, no lights visible from the street—there was a perfect stillness that hung around the Vargas residence. Johnny stalked towards the side of the fence, wriggling past the propped up and _still_ broken gate and into the neatly maintained backyard.

The bedroom light was on, not that it particularly mattered either way. Johnny clambered onto the ever-empty dog house and jumped into the lower branches of the tree below Edgar’s window. The closest branch to the second story window was still a good six feet away. Before he could second guess himself, he vaulted onto the window ledge, fingers scrabbling painfully against the painted brickwork as he landed.

He paused on the sill, contemplating the view. There was something neat and contained about the world boxed in the confines of a window frame, a manageability. Even when the figures within moved around, they were still frozen in a tiny world of their own. Inside Edgar was leaning over an open book and slew of handwritten notes. Homework probably. Johnny grimaced as he slid the squeaky window open and climbed inside.

“You must be in a bad mood,” Edgar muttered distractedly, not bothering to look up from his work. “I heard you when you first came through the gate instead of when you hit the roof.”

“I half expected you to still be out with your new _buddy_ ,” Johnny retorted. He said it with all the distaste one might reserve for a gangrenous infection. “If I’d known you were shopping around for charity cases—”

“You’re hardly one to talk,” Edgar interrupted gently, attention still focused on his history paper. “Todd Casil? It took a bit of prodding to get Devi explain what happened yesterday.”

Johnny sneered, slamming Edgar’s window shut and dropping onto the bed with a huff. A pillow puffed into the air from the force of his landing.

“Sweet kid,” he said, at last. “High school’s a fuckin’ viper pit. It’s a cruel cosmic joke how the decent ones get mixed up with the rest of them.”

Todd had a teddy bear in his locker. Todd had a house next door to Johnny’s, as still as the surface of a swamp where a body had been left to dissolve. It was a terrible stillness. Todd’s father—Johnny felt his face crunching into a grimace—

A kid needs a father.

“We’re really quite the philanthropists,” Edgar remarked. He still hadn’t looked up from his paper, but Johnny could hear the faint twist of a smile in his voice. His sense of humor, if you could call it that, was all kinds of screwy.

Johnny snorted. “That’s what they call bored rich people who like to jerk around needy kids.”

Edgar tapped his pencil against the table, just once. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds like us.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this has been sitting in drafts for a year and now I can't remember why

Here was what Jimmy had discovered about Nny's unofficial protégé: he lived in a house that was, like most of the houses in that neighborhood, practically a shack with a paint job, he seemed to jump at every single noise, and he read text books in his spare time, marking out the errors with a sparkly purple pen. Basically, he was a monster dweeb. Jimmy was at a total loss as to what a badass like Johnny could want with the least punk person ever born. What did Todd have that he didn't have, besides a truly unfortunate stutter. And a weird lump of fuzz he carried around everywhere. Jimmy had seen him cooing over it, once, and frankly? It was super creepy.

Down the hall, Todd was spinning the combination lock on his locker, shoulders drawn in as if he was trying to shield the thing. Well, he was gonna find out soon enough how futile that was. Jimmy ducked a little bit farther behind the corner of the hallway, peering around with one completely totally healed eye. This was going to be _wild._

The hand clamped down on Jimmy's shoulder with absolutely no warning, and his spine attempted to exit its flesh prison in immediate knee-jerk panic. His right fist cracked into the door of a locker. He had been lurking at the end of the hall, observing Todd with what he imagined was nigh artistic subtlety, when the shock put him in through a near apoplectic fit. He whirled, clutching his fist to his chest, and found Edgar about one step behind him, nearly nose to nose with him. He seemed utterly unfazed by the violent outburst.

"Jesus Christ," Jimmy swore, more spit than sound.

"Lord's name in vain," Edgar replied. He sounded mildly bored, as if he was marking off a score on a sport whose outcome interested him very little. "What are you up to now?"

Jimmy turned back to the hallway, just in time to catch the slide of countless plastic spiders tumbling out of Todd's locker and directly onto his impossibly-wide-eyed face. The kid cracked his mouth open in a silent scream that abruptly broke into a real, ear piercing wail. Rubber bugs cheerfully bounced across the tile. Jimmy spun back to Edgar, smothering a gale of laughter under his hand. Oh god. He could feel tears starting in his eyes.

Edgar took in the scene, meticulously observing each detail. "You're a bully," he observed, returning his attention at last to Jimmy.

Jimmy shrugged, still giggling. In his opinion, the terms "bully" and "person" were interchangeable; Edgar might as well have pointed out that he had five fingers on each hand and a nervous system.

"You want bully, you should have seen the time the football team threw me into the trashcan at the top of the hill," he replied, distantly aware that he might need to put things in perspective for those among the human race still mired in delusion about human nature. He was generous like that.

Edgar glanced back up to where Todd was frantically wailing and trying to brush plastic bugs off himself. "Are you going to own up to that?"

Jimmy scoffed. "Hell no," he said, "that kid's boyfriend is major freaky. I think he's, like, the scion of the Illuminati. Maybe the mafia."

Edgar tilted his head. "Illuminati, no," he said, thoughtfully, "but mafia? Who knows."

Down the hall, Todd seemed to have finally figured out that the locker invasion force was entirely inanimate and was breathing deeply, palms on knees, bent over at the waist. Jimmy felt a flicker of uncertainty, watching it. He hadn't actually expected that level of terror; it was only rubber and plastic after all.

"In any case," Edgar went on, "you really shouldn't be doing that. God knows what Johnny will do if he catches you terrorizing his wayward duckling like that. I doubt even I'd be able to protect you."

Jimmy sobered, the last vestiges of mirth slipping off his face. "You?" he said. "Protect me?"

"It's less ludicrous than you might think," Edgar said. There seemed to be a casual insinuation here, the implication of—of what? Of incompetence? Of a _threat_?

Jimmy found Edgar’s disinterested confidence unnerving. He clenched his fists. "I don't need _you_ to protect me.”

All around them kids were going on with their usual lives, chatting, switching their backpacks from shoulder to shoulder, weaving around knots of conversation. When Edgar fixed his gaze on Jimmy, as placid as the deep cool surface of a mountain lake, all the world around them seemed to dim into spectral nothingness.

“Oh Jimmy,” Edgar said. He smiled pleasantly. “You really don’t know anything at all, do you?”

-X-

Really, all in all the day was shaping up to be a pretty fucking awesome one. Aside from the vaguely disapproving glance Edgar gave him as they moved away from the scene of his Masterpiece, Jimmy walked out onto the parking lot feeling pretty good. And really, the Casil kid should know better than broadcasting to their shark-tank of a school just how weak his constitution was, hopefully this was a lesson learned.

His first breath of air outside of the stuffy, sweat-ladden musk of their school's halls revitalized him. He felt like he could make the walk home in four and a half hours instead of five, which would leave him just enough time to bum a beer or two off of his neighbor, Mr. Samsa.  Connections were important. How could one possibly pull off something as grand as a locker full of plastic spiders without knowing the asshole in charge of disposing of unsold product at the mall?

Jimmy watched Edgar pat down his bag for a set of keys and thought rather generously that if nothing else the guy could be someone good to catch rides with, at least until he got his own kick ass car. He waited, gleefully clicking his tongue to a clock rhythm despite the delightfully narrow-eyed look Edgar gave him as he did so.  Jimmy eyed heavy set of class binders the other man pushed back into the depths of his bag, unsurprised and distinctly unimpressed.

It was entirely possible that under other circumstances, Jimmy might have been—if not a superb student, at least a competent and unremarkable one. He had long been under the opinion that a person was the product of their experiences, although in his own case he never would have considered this a _bad_ thing. Life was a crucible, forging total badasses out of the limited materials of mundane humanity. Sure, in a world where he could spend more time at home, maybe he’d actually get some homework done, but it was a small price to pay for rising to his full kick ass potential. It also gave him a pretty solid reason to tag along after Edgar on this particular Thursday night, before a geometry test.

Edgar drove them here—he hadn’t realized it was so far away from campus—with very little fanfare. He’d simply opened the passenger door, gestured vaguely at Jimmy, and gone round to the driver’s side with a shrug. Jimmy had really expected to need to wheedle more on that one.

"I forgot my key so we'll have to go through the back," Edgar informed him.

Jimmy smirked, still panting faintly from the climb up the hill to Edgar's house. He bowed, motioning for Edgar to show the way.

He was led to a side gate that had to be lifted and moved in its entirety before they could squeeze past, through to a decently sized back yard. Edgar dropped to his knees and started digging through a scrawny, staved looking garden of weeds and rocks.

Jimmy looked around, but there wasn't much else there really. A few really shitty bushes, overgrown trees and an old dog house, the perks of living in the suburbs he supposed. There was less land to maintain, less trash to clean up.

"Found it." Edgar held it up triumphantly, a wan smile on his face as he motioned to the door. Jimmy followed him up the steps, but paused to stare at the yard again.

"You have a dog?" He looked around, half curious, half vaguely on edge. He didn't have a good track record with dogs. They ran wild on the outskirts of town.

"No."

"Then why the fuck—" The door clicked open and Jimmy dubiously watched Edgar disappear inside. He left it open behind him, a gaping mouth much like those in the horror films Jimmy regularly liberated from the video rental store in town. He looked around the backyard again, unease raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Edgar was _Johnny's_ friend after all. Red flags should probably be a given.

"Are you coming up?" Edgar's voice floated out from the darkened room ahead.

Not creepy, not creepy at all. Okay, the whole feel of the place was way fucking weird but Jimmy liked that sort of thing, right? This was a point in Edgar's favor. Right? With eyes darting from the ominous look of the dog house and then to the various decorative metal wall hangings proclaiming the wonders of gardening, he briefly considered the possibility that perhaps this wasn't Edgar's house at all.

The door continued to gape at him and Edgar was nowhere to be seen. He hadn’t turned on any lights on his way up. Squaring his shoulders Jimmy stepped out of the grayish evening light and into a depressingly dark sitting room that smelled strongly of lemon disinfectant. His eyes adjusted quickly, showing him a wide array of old but, as far as he could tell, reasonably well maintained furniture and a sensible number of knickknacks.

Jimmy cringed a bit at the very delicate glass figures on the end tables closest to him, a deep sense of foreboding warning him that at some point in this new friendship he was doomed to be the asshole who bumped into one of those and broke something. He took a moment to appreciate that at least most of them weren't clowns, but personally felt that collecting blank faced angels weren't much better.

"Please don't leave the door open."

"SHIT!" Jimmy nearly jumped out of his skin, hand coming down hard on the back of the couch nearest to him. The end table beside it trembled, the shrouded figurine rattling on its perch. He held his breath until it stilled and then threw Edgar, who was standing at the bottom of a now dimly lit set of stairs, an irritated glare before he could stop himself. "You scared the crap out of me."

Edgar's smile now was a little better than it was outside, if only for the amused head tilt he gave as he moved quietly to shut the back door. Jimmy then followed him upstairs, eying the rooms he could see into, counting windows and absentmindedly making note of which steps made the most noise when he stepped on them.

The bedroom was brighter than what he'd seen so far of the house, window opened a crack and blinds pulled up. It was neater than Jimmy's usual standards but it still felt way more lived in than downstairs. He slipped to the window and peered out at the twisting tree branches within jumping distance and the dog house sitting conveniently at its base. His hands skimmed the faint scuff marks on the windowsill with sudden understanding and reverence.

Bingo!

He spun and leveled Edgar a cheery grin. Faking interest in tutoring and school work would be a lot easier if he could anticipate the possibility of a visitor later. He tossed his bag on the neatly made bed with the intention of dragging out every geometry problem from the past year in a bid to stay as often and late as he could.  Yes, everyone had their uses if you were patient enough to find them.

Four hours later he was holding on to the promise of a possible visit from Nny as a lifeline. Even with Edgar's admittedly simpler explanations and calm, patient demeanor he was about two equations away from splitting open and spraying frustrated, nervous energy all over this neat little house. Seventeen minutes later he cracked.

"I need a minute." He pushed the heels of his hands hard against his eye sockets to counter the pain of a headache. "Fuck, what am I doing?"

"Making it worse." Edgar was looking at him patiently when Jimmy's hands thudded against the desk. "I think a break would be good, we can review things a little when we get back. Come on." He stood and disappeared out into the hall.

Jimmy slumped over the desk for a moment, tucking his head into his arms. Anything would be better at that point than the endless recitation and note taking on calculating the circumference of circles with a radius or diameter. What the fuck was pie anyway, did he have to memorize the whole thing? He moaned into the sleeves of his shirt, resolving to grab a graphing calculator when he was next in town to get things. Slightly dejected he sat up and grabbed a small blue notepad from the big pocket of his bag to write it down. With Edgar gone the sounds outside filtered inside a little more clearly. The abrupt silence of a cricket's chirping in the backyard sparked hope and had him out of his chair and to the window before he even realized what about it had gotten him so excited. But it was well after dark and he could barely see past his reflection in the glass.

He pulled the window open all the way and squinted at the shadows behind the house in the hopes of seeing any telltale sign of Johnny lurking nearby. After a few minutes of searching the chirping started again, other nighttime noises slowly starting up again as well. Disappointed, Jimmy headed downstairs, following the sounds of Edgar in the kitchen.

There was a precise spread of sandwich making materials across the counter top, laid out like an assembly line. Edgar had pulled out some kind of strange gourmet mustard and was delicately peeling the seal off it as Jimmy entered the room.

“You know you’re actually very good at math,” Edgar said. “You’ve just learned about two semester’s worth of equations in a single sitting. If you applied yourself, you’d be in pre-calc by now.”

Jimmy screwed up his face. He definitely didn’t feel like he was any kind of math genius. Mostly he felt like he was going to rip the next page with a diagram of a triangle out and _eat_ it.

“Here,” Edgar said. He held out a sandwich, very prettily put together. “This one is for you.”

Jimmy accepted it, but hesitantly. “I don’t eat—”

“I know,” Edgar said. “That one’s just bacon and tomato.”

Jimmy blinked down at the thing. He was certain he had never told Edgar about his dining preferences before, and he was equally certain that no one had bothered to make him anything more complicated than toast (leftover, with a bite taken out of it) since he was a small child. Quite a small child.

“Um,” he said. “Thanks.”

Edgar looked genuinely pleased. They ate mostly in silence, and Jimmy’s thoughts were wound up in a strange refrain of Edgar’s pleased expression and a thin memory of some lunch, years and years ago, in his own kitchen. He remembered a tiny cup of wine, a child’s cup printed with cartoon dinosaurs, to match his tiny sandwich. It must have been a good day. He had no idea why he remembered it now.

“How come your parents aren’t home?” he asked, at last.

“My mother’s in Seattle leading a training session for some new computer program,” Edgar replied. He had folded his hands over his empty plate, fingers completely free of crumbs. “My father is on call.”

Jimmy wanted ask if this _was_ Edgar’s house, after all, but decided ultimately against it. The bedroom was too lived-in to be a fake, and anyways, what would be the point of breaking into a strange house only to tutor a classmate? Not even just a classmate, an underclassman. Jimmy could definitely comprehend the idea of someone not wanting him to know where they lived—for all the good it would do them, if he took an interest—but not _Edgar_. Edgar wouldn’t do that.

Johnny never did show up. Jimmy thought he heard rustling downstairs again, only a little later in the evening, but when he made an excuse to open the window, there was nothing at all below. He sighed, accepting temporary defeat, and turned back to the desk where Edgar was waiting, looking thoughtful. It was getting late. There was no way he could walk to his own house from here, and he was wary of catching buses at night. Not that he was _afraid_ , per say, just wary. Not everyone in town knew what a stone cold badass he was. The journey might be eventful.

His eye caught on a leaf of paper taped to Edgar’s door. He meandered across the bedroom, ignoring the insistent call of the open text book, and examined it. The bullet points of the list were neat, handwritten, and precise.

_Do no violence_

_Do not lie_

_Do not overstep social boundaries_

_Do not upset stable systems_

“…What’s this?”

Edgar glanced over and then returned to his notebook. “Morality.”

“Did your parents—”

“No, I wrote it.”

Jimmy considered the list. Half the notes seemed to be religious, and the other half seemed to be weirdly mundane. _Don’t touch people without permission. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain_. Was that what morality was? Jimmy had never really put much thought to morals—as far as he was concerned, if he could get away with something it was fair game. He wondered vaguely why someone would bother to write that sort of thing down. As far as he was aware, it wasn’t what normal people did. He’d broken into a couple houses before and he’d never seen anybody else with a list like this.

On the door. On the inside of the door. Something about that niggled at him. There was some kind of importance in the placement, right here at eye level on the inside of a bedroom door, like—like it was a reminder, or a schedule.

“It’s getting late,” Edgar said, startling Jimmy out of the mesmer he had been falling into. “It’s gotten quite dark.”

The square of the window glittered with the faint light of the houses down the hill, the sky above it a dull ochre, and inside the neat frame it seemed as if the stars and the earth had been uprooted and flipped. Jimmy found it disconcerting, and then strangely pleasant.

“You shouldn’t take the bus at this time of night,” Edgar told him, sorting his text books into their respective pockets in his backpack.

“You could drive me,” Jimmy said. He tried not to sound too hopeful.

“No,” Edgar said. “I’ve only had my license for a little while. I shouldn’t drive after dark.” He said this in the disinterested way that you might read instructions for assembling a kitchen table.

“Oh.” Jimmy thought of the long walk home—well, he could walk to the 7/11 and buy some coffee, and coast on that until morning. Then he could take the bus back to his house, which would be empty by then if he had any luck at all, and crash there at last. These tense late nights wandering the city were not his favorites, but there was something in the hazy exhaustion of dawn finally breaking over downtown that made even the hours of the worst nights fall away. He wouldn't mind seeing it again.

Edgar pressed something into his hand—a pillow with a sunbleached floral print—and pulled him away from the window. "Do you have any particular health requirements?"

"No?" Jimmy replied. He watched Edgar striding across the room, unfolding a thin blanket from its high resting place at the top of his bookshelves. There was a precision even in the unfolding of fabric, and Jimmy watched the motions of his hands, thinking aimlessly about the shape of his fingers. "What are you doing?"

Edgar glanced over his shoulder. "I'm putting down the spare linens for you. I don't want to have to fight with you about who's hogging what, I'd rather just let you have your own blanket."

"Um. I have to get going. It's a long walk." He gestured towards the window, hands opening ineffectually, at a loss to convey exactly how long that walk would have to be.

"You're not walking. Give me that back," Edgar said. He took the faded pillow and set it at the head of the mattress. It was a queen size, Jimmy noticed belatedly. They really were comfortable out here in the suburbs. "Stay here tonight. I'll give you a ride to school in the morning." 

Jimmy looked at the bed. The sheets were white. Too white. And even on a queen sized mattress, that was awfully—they were both pretty big for their ages—he felt the sudden phantom press of a shoulder against his back, as real as if they were already—

"It's not _that_ long of a walk," Jimmy babbled. "Definitely not more than five hours. I've done it loads of times. There was this one time I took the wrong bus home and I ended up in Eagle Gate, I mean, damn _that_ was a hike."

"You'd miss the bus, and that means you'd miss class," Edgar said, "if you didn't just sleep through the whole day to begin with. You're not going to miss this test."

"You didn't _have_ to help me study." Jimmy hissed.

"I and my time have nothing to do with this," Edgar contended. He flicked open the button at the top of his shirt, in a single graceful movement. "You're too good at this to be failing the class. It's not the right order of things."

"Buttons," Jimmy said.

Edgar paused with his fingers over the fourth button down. "Beg your pardon?"

"What?" Jimmy replied automatically. "What, nothing."

The fully weight of Edgar's gaze rested on him just a fraction too long for Jimmy's preference. Then he snapped through the remaining buttons and shrugged off his shirt entirely, apparently satisfied with whatever data he had gathered. Edgar, anyways, seemed to know exactly what to do. The hallway beyond the bedroom was dark enough that Jimmy walked right into the little table with the decorative teddy bear when Edgar directed him out towards the bathroom, where he had been ordered to take a shower before he left permanent grease marks on the sheets. Jimmy muttered under his breath, now sure that some part of this whole situation was planned, the fates had probably decided to stick their overlong, omniscient noses into his life by dangling uglyass figurines, neatly folded sheets, and the other strange delicate trappings of Edgar's weird ass life in front of his face when he least needed them. It would be just like them to trigger a montage of embarrassingly melodramatic bathroom hijinks that involved someone seeing someone else's naked ass. And it had been shaping up to be such a great day.

Jimmy kept glancing back at the door as he pulled his shirt off, as he stepped out of his pants, as he grabbed the shower curtain. It remained as closed as ever.

Actually Jimmy had to admit to himself that this was a pretty sweet deal for the shower if nothing else. It seemed like the thing would never run cold, and the water pressure? Unreal. Edgar had some kind of shampoo that smelled like the coolest hours of spring mornings, so strong and pretty that Jimmy had to pause with his hands dripping green to check for evidence of another person in this bathroom. There was really nothing else, though, just enough of each item for exactly one person. The shampoo had to be Edgar's. Jimmy found himself mildly scandalized by the sensuality of it.

He gave into the urge to just lean against the tiled wall under the spray after washing his hair and considered asking to sleep in the tub if only to remember the gloriousness of that moment. After over a weeks worth of oil and dirt had been washed away the sluice of water was near unbelievable and most definitely felt cleaner than what he had at home. His skin burned pleasantly and under the miasma of steam and crisp, tingly smell of the shampoo Jimmy was distantly sure he'd hit some kind of jackpot. The possibility of daytime rides, food, and showers? So long as he played his cards right he might get a repeat of tonight. Wouldn't hurt his chances of getting to see Johnny more often either. That was definitely enough to justify doing this again.

He was feeling pretty good about the future by the time the hot water finally cut out, shoulders back as he winked at himself in the mirror, and that lasted him all the way to the door of Edgar's bedroom, where he suddenly remembered that he was wearing a towel and it was too late to go back for his shirt, he should have changed before he left the bathroom but now Edgar could come out any second and see him walking away from his door and it would be _obvious_ that he'd been too embarrassed to go in without a shirt on and Edgar absolutely could not be allowed to know-

The knob disappeared from under his fingers as Edgar pulled the door open.

"Oh," Edgar said, nearly nose to nose with him. "There you are. I have a spare t-shirt for you."

Jimmy followed him in and pulled on the spare shirt on a kind of autopilot. He'd never done the sleepover thing before. His friends, when he had them, had mostly been the kind of people you smoke outside the gym with and then part ways. Or the kind, when he was little, whose parents didn't have time to indulge in that sort of thing. The other kids in the neighborhood had all been older than him. Looking around Edgar's neat, strange room, Jimmy was overcome with an uncertainty that was nearly dizzying. Was he the kind of person who could just spend the night with another person? In a strange house? For free?

The lights cut out. Edgar withdrew his hand from the switch and settled onto the bed, shifting pillows and sheets to his particular liking.

"You can always sleep on the couch if you'd prefer," he said. "But Johnny usually uses the bed, so I've gotten used to sharing."

Johnny. Well if it was good enough for Johnny, then Jimmy could do it too. He imagined himself in Johnny's place, filling the same divots in the mattress, _being_ him. It was enough to draw him to the edge of the bed, enough to make him fold back the blankets. The sheet was cool against his skin, the blankets in his hand had a heft that unnerved him. Everything in that moment was almost too real, too heavy with the thickness of existence. Edgar's even breaths were so loud, as loud as the shifting of cloth over cloth.

Slowly, like a man in a monster movie trying desperately not to wake the things in the darkness, Jimmy slipped underneath the covers and surrendered to a delicate, temporary peace.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I got a nice review so on a whim I decided to try and finish the fic. let's see how that goes.

When the phone rang at six AM on a Saturday, Johnny finally broke. He came lurching out of his room, swinging into the hall, and ripped the receiver off the hook. “ _Hello_?” he snarled.

“Hello?” a nervous voice on the other end said. “Is this—Sorry, I’m calling to speak with Mrs. C—”

“She’s at work,” Johnny cut in. “Can I take a fucking message?”

“Er,” the voice said. “I…. guess. I mean, I’ve been leaving messages for a couple weeks now but—okay. My name is Eric Brovitch, I represent Lector and Hassan. I’m putting together a class action lawsuit against Johnson Products Incorporated and I was hoping to get at least a testimony—”

“What the fuck does my mother have to do with any of that?”

There was a pause. “Your mother,” Brovitch said. “So then you’d be Johnny?”

Johnny didn’t at all like the way the voice got all soft and gentle there. Whatever this was about, it could only be bad. “Maybe,” he said. “Why?”

“Well it’s really—actually this is as much about you as it is about your mother. Could you answer some questions for me?”

“No,” Johnny said.

 “I understand if you’re hesitant to go on record with your medical history but—”

 Johnny slammed the phone back into its holder and walked away.

There was a shrimpy willow tree in his yard that spent the next ten minutes taking apart with a dull shovel. The remaining branches got it first, and then went for the bark strip by strip. Chips flew off the trunk like shrapnel, sticking to him in a mismatched spray as sweat beaded across his forehead and shoulders, flakes of rust, his oversized t-shirt slipping down his arm. Normally he’d go talk to Edgar, but Edgar was out taking his new pet shopping and Johnny would rather eat razors than bare his soul in the presence of fucking _Jimmy_.

 

 

 

“No,” Edgar said.

Jimmy paused preening in front of the mirror to give Edgar an exasperated look. The t-shirt he pulled on had the fabric ripped out and patched in roughly the same placement as stylized ribs, and it was stone cold bad ass. “What?” he said. “This one doesn’t even have any holes in it.”

They were in the Hot Topic in the mall, both of them squeezed into the one changing room because it was too much of a pain to get accidentally locked out every single time he wanted to show Edgar something. It was kind of weird changing with Edgar’s unblinking laser eyes pointed right at him, but that didn’t stop him from trying to showcase his best angles. If Edgar was going to watch him like that, he ought to get the prime cut, right?

“I said I would buy you a new backpack,” Edgar replied, folding his hands over his crossed knees. “I’m not buying you clothes, regardless of how good you look in them.”

Jimmy plucked at the hem of the shirt. “But I do look good, right?”

“No,” Edgar said.

There was an ugly little pop and deflation in Jimmy’s chest. He dropped the hem, and hardly noticed that Edgar had gotten up from his seat until he was standing right in front of him. Edgar stopped just short of their shoes touching—polished toe to ratty black sneaker—and dropped his head, running his fingers over the knotted seam where the patchwork joined the rest of the fabric. Jimmy froze. Edgar ran the pads of his fingers down, over real rib cage and over the waist of Jimmy’s jeans, pausing there for a moment. Jimmy’s stomach went hot and strange under the faint pressure.

Edgar tilted his head, the way he did when he was considering something interesting, and then added, “It’s too baggy. The one with the fishnet sleeves looked better.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said. He licked his uncomfortably dry lips and turned his attention back to the shirt lying wadded in the corner of the dressing room. “Huh.”

“But I’m not buying you either,” Edgar finished, stepping back outside of the doorway. “You need a backpack for school. You don’t need designer goth.”

“Some sugar daddy you are,” Jimmy muttered, as he pulled the changing room door closed between them. Then he slumped back against it, a hand on his churning stomach. He felt like he’d fallen out of a window, but in a good way. What the fuck?

A minute later Jimmy opened up the door again and Edgar just held up a hand like some kind of disinterested crossing guard barring his way. “Put it back,” he said.

Sullenly, Jimmy unfolded the fishnet shirt from where it was hiding under his current shirt. “But you said it looked good on me,” he whined.

“No shoplifting,” Edgar said. “Economically it relies on the assumption that you’re the only person doing it, and you almost certainly are not.”

“You’re so boooooring,” Jimmy said, tossing the now thoroughly wrinkled thing at Edgar’s face. “I’ve got to rob them at _some_ point. They’re on my check list.”

Edgar paused in the middle of his meticulous folding. “Check list?”

Jimmy pulled a small notebook, fiercely battered, from the back waistband of his jeans. He flipped through it to one messy page in particular and tapped the checked boxes. “I’m working my way through the mall,” he said. “I tried to hit here a couple times before but normally they won’t let me into the changing room without supervision.”

Edgar regarded the notebook for a moment. “You are,” he said, with some fascination, “a truly terrible human being.”

Jimmy shrugged and tucked the notebook back into his jeans again. He kind of liked it when Edgar said stuff like that. Like he was impressed with Jimmy? It made his heart beat faster.

They walked from the Hot Topic to the Sears in mostly silence, as Jimmy tried to dissect whatever it was that kept making him feel so weird. Of course, it wasn’t like he’d never felt that way before—he distinctly remembered preschool camp, with Johnny, the time the Johnny turned to the other kids and said (he’d never forgotten this), _No, I want to play with Jimmy_. It’s perpetually fresh in his memory, Johnny’s back between him and the other boys, the football in their hands, the buzz in his own stomach as Johnny just so casually said it—

But that’s not like this, is it? Johnny’s his soul mate, so of course there would be weird nice feelings. They’re like twins. You know how twins do stuff at the same time even in different countries, and they know what each other is thinking, and they can tell when something bad happened? Him and Johnny are like that. They’re not related or anything, but they’re like… brothers of the mind. He tends to think of them as two microphones on the same stage. So getting weird feedback from talking to Johnny is fine. He just doesn’t understand what _Edgar_ has to do with it.

“When you get this new backpack,” Edgar was saying, “I expect you to be more careful with it. No more lab animals.”

Jimmy just looked at him. What was it? What kind of supernatural connection could a person like _Edgar_ have with Jimmy? Was it just the feedback from Johnny triangulating off their shared friend? But it didn’t _feel_ like it was coming from Johnny, it definitely felt like it was coming directly from the kid beside him.

“And leave the freshmen alone,” Edgar said, “if you know what’s good for you. You’ll lose more than a backpack if you’re not careful, and I may be willing to donate some school supplies but I’m not willing to part with a kidney for anyone.”

Jimmy missed a step. “Did you just make a joke?”

“If only,” Edgar murmured.

Uneasily, Jimmy jogged a couple feet to catch up. “So uh,” he said, “I haven’t seen Devi around much. Do you think Nny and her are on the rocks?”

“They’re always on the rocks,” Edgar said. “Ever since he had that episode last year.”

“Episode.” Jimmy frowned, feeling for the thousandth time in his life that he’s being left out of something deliberately. “What happened, exactly?”

Edgar led them into the Sears, effortlessly navigating them deep into the appropriate aisles. “He tried to choke her out in the middle of a conversation. He tells me he doesn’t know what set it off. You might have noticed,” Edgar added, as he ducked down aisle fifteen, “that I’m very careful how I talk to him. But then I’ve known him the longest.”

Jimmy leaned back against the rack, letting Edgar do the majority of the sorting work. “So like,” he said, “has he ever tried to do that to you?”

“He pulled a knife on me,” Edgar said, with a shrug. At Jimmy’s startled look, he went on, “it was sixth grade, and he used to need to be armed to walk home from middle school. It was the neighborhood he walked through. One day I told him something he didn’t want to hear.”

It was actually not that hard to imagine Johnny grabbing Edgar by the collar, maybe a switchblade in his hand, his eyes wide and his face pulled into that wracked, wild expression—Jimmy had trouble imagining Edgar as anything but dully disapproving though.

“What’d you tell him?” Jimmy asked.

Edgar pushed a canvass bag into his hands. “That he had a problem. He doesn’t like to hear that. In any case it turned out to be something of a self demonstrating article, so I think I made my point. Try that one on.”

Jimmy obliged, although he kind of didn’t want to.

“Devi wants him to get help,” Edgar said, adjusting the straps at Jimmy’s sides. “Not that he can afford it, if we’re being completely honest.”

Jimmy watched Edgar’s quick fingers fiddling with the stubborn straps and kind of (kind of?) wished they’d touch his stomach again (again?) just so he could get a better reading on what that weird feeling was, even now buzzing a little bit below the surface.

“He doesn’t need help,” Jimmy said, “he’s great. Everybody else needs help. If she doesn’t like him the way he is, she doesn’t deserve him.”

Edgar looked up, and it felt like he was peeling Jimmy back layer by layer with his eyes, like a laboratory dissection. His face was _really_ close. Then his expression clicked off, quickly as a lamp, and it was over.

“One of the reasons I like you,” he said, finishing his adjustment with one clean tug, “is the way your bizarre moral relativism forces me to reevaluate my own understanding of the world.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said. And then, “So you like me?”

 

 

 

Johnny tried to remember.

He’d picked out a seat on the roof of the crackhouse at the edge of the neighborhood, blissfully quiet at ten in the morning, where he could watch the rest of the driveways. He tried to remember anything really. Just like it had every time before, the reel of recollection ran to white around age twelve, regardless of how carefully he walked it backward or what train he followed to get there. He couldn’t have even said how he met Edgar, not for sure. As far back as he can go, Edgar was just _there_. And then Devi, and with Devi came Tenna, and now… the mouthy little dickwaffle… but the point was, like the midpoint of a dream, Johnny had no idea how he came to be here at all. He once asked his mother if they had ever lived anywhere else, and the look on her face—he still didn’t know what the answer was.

The phone call was nagging at him. He went to Edgar’s house last night to talk about it, but he didn’t feel any better now. It always took him a long time to get the real problem out, and now with Edgar always being off taking _Jimmy_ around somewhere, there was never enough time to have a proper conversation. Every time Johnny opened his mouth, he felt the walls closing in. He won’t have enough time. He won’t get there. And that made it even harder, and then that made it _harder_ , and—

 _Why_ _couldn’t he remember anything before sixth grade_?

In a fit of blind anxiety, he ripped a tile free from the roof and slung it across the top of the neighborhood, where it embedded itself in something that sounded uncomfortably like a cat. Johnny winced.

Devi wasn’t talking to him, Edgar was always busy, and everyone else in the world was a fucking idiot—he seriously felt like climbing the walls. Figuratively. Literally, he’d already climbed the wall here.

“If Jimmy hadn’t stuck his greasy little nose in our business…” he grumbled to no one, picking flecks of tar from the skinned roof.

If he could just walk his memories back far enough, past the blank white reel, maybe he could figure out what the hell some lawyer wanted with him and his mother. For the thousandth time, he wished he hadn’t hung up on the call so quickly. There hadn’t been another one since.

A couple houses down, a beat up minivan pulled out of the marginally better-kept Casil family garage. Johnny perked up. From here he could just make out Squee in the back yard, dutifully digging a hole in the dirt for a pet sized grave.

Well, if he couldn’t get any support from his so called friends, he could at least offer his support to the tender bud of youth.

 

 

 

It was lunch. Jimmy was embroiled in a battle with the overcooked, rubbery meat type substance that the cafeteria lunch had provided him with, while Edgar and Johnny leaned over a sheet of notes, cramming for their history midterm. Jimmy might have been taking the lunchmeat a bit too seriously, but what else was he supposed to do? He didn’t _have_ history. He couldn’t exactly contribute, not that he hadn’t considered trying.

There was a shuffle and clank as Tenna sat down beside him.

“Heya,” she said.

Jimmy gave her a suspicious once over. They hadn’t said much to each other in the last month, even though Tenna ate with them more often than she didn’t. “Hey,” he said.

“You like the fair?”

“Uh. I guess? I dunno? I’ve never been.”

“Perfect.” Tenna pulled a ticket out of her bra—wasn’t that uncomfortable?—and slid it across the table like a secret spy file folder. “Devi won’t go with me after what happened last year.”

“Wait,” Jimmy says, “I don’t—are you inviting me?”

“No, I’m just giving you a ticket to hold for me.” She smiled at him, brightly enough that he wasn’t sure whether she was kidding or not. “Yeah, I’m inviting you. Don’t look so suspicious, jeeze, you’re as bad as Devi.”

Jimmy dragged the ticket back towards himself with one finger. “It’s on the other side of town from me,” he pointed out. “I can’t walk there.”

“I’ll pick you up,” Tenna said. “I’m used to driving people around. Devi won’t go anywhere unless I take her.”

Jimmy looked from the ticket to Tenna, to the dream team aggressively studying a foot away from him. Why shouldn’t he go? He didn’t need either one of them to have fun on a Friday night.

“Okay,” he said. “But we have to go on a rollercoaster.”

Tenna picked him up after her last class, swinging into the pickup lane in her snot green beetle bug just as he was seriously starting to consider whether he could climb the flag pole high enough to do a Quasimodo onto the vice principal’s minivan. Tenna’s car didn’t have air conditioning, but it was late enough in the fall that with the windows rolled down you could hardly tell. Jimmy tossed his bag into the back seat and kicked up his feet on the dashboard, which Tenna blithely ignored.

He spent most of the drive watching her. She’d always been a kind of wild card in his understanding of the clique’s dynamics. Judging by the tuba case he’d thrown his backpack over, she was in marching band or something, which probably accounted for her not being around more often.

She turned in tickets for both of them. It was a weirdly specific moment—it nagged at him all the way into the fairground, while she caught him by the elbow and pulled him towards the petting zoo tent. He briefly forgot about it under the terrible revelation of how large actual, real life pigs were, and the subsequent terror of seeing what a turkey looked like with all its feathers intact (there were not _enough_ feathers, unfortunately), but by the time they were divvying up cotton candy by color (he liked the yellow flavor, whatever it was. Tenna found that horrifying.) he was back to puzzling over it.

“So,” he said, making a yellow flavored ball out of his portion of candy, “are we dating?”

Tenna hacked up a lung full of blue candy puff. “Oh holy shit,” she said, “no, definitely not.”

“Oh,” he said. He frowned vaguely. It wasn’t like he really _wanted_ to date Tenna, but it would have been nice to be wanted. He would have gone along with it, probably. “Damn.”

Tenna gave him a look over her next mouthful. “You gonna leave now?”

“No,” Jimmy said, squinting at her. “I just got here.”

“So you’re not like disappointed or whatever?”

Jimmy shrugged one shoulder. “Not really, I guess. I’m just trying to figure out why you invited me.”

Tenna made a knowing noise and nodded sagely. “Edgar likes you,” she said. “And for being such a boring guy, he knows how to pick out interesting people.” She squished a puff of candy between her fingers, watching the crystal edges where her left over saliva was starting to melt it away. “You know how there’s always that one kid in every class who’s just an antisocial left footed weirdo? Edgar can smell it on you. I’ve seen him sniff out a former sixth grade misfit in a pack of cheering varsity jocks.”

Something about that made Jimmy’s stomach sink. He didn’t like being the latest in some hobby trend of Edgar’s—he’d been thinking, oh, maybe there was something special about the two of them after all. Maybe he was somebody special to Edgar.

“Well I’m not like that,” Jimmy said, more aggressively than he meant to. “I’m an outsider ‘cause I don’t _wanna_ be an insider.”

Tenna popped her candy into her mouth. “Most people say that, but if you actually had a choice, you’d think differently.”

“Well what about you?” Jimmy snapped. “You... you stuffed-animal-carrying band geek?”

Tenna smiled at him. It was the kind of smile that seemed simultaneously like a handshake and a threat. “You got me,” she said. “But hey, we’re here now, aren’t we? You learn to love it. Weird and proud, mi amigo.”

Jimmy stared at her for an uncomfortable moment, and then turned his attention to the Ferris wheel. The sun setting behind it turned the whole thing into a spindly black spider against the orange sky.

“Weird and proud,” he muttered back. In the distance, a yoyo dropped its screaming passengers down a hundred feet of pure free fall.

“Come on,” Tenna said. “You haven’t tried the spaceship one yet. It simulates real abduction.”

“Yeah alright.” Jimmy crumpled up the cotton candy bag and tossed it at the trashcan. “So does it like take you up into space?”

“No, but it spins you really fast!”

“Sweet.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> things come to a head

Johnny woke up to the sound of a car backfiring, lying upside down with his feet over the edge of the bed. He groaned and picked himself up, ready to start the day dizzy and miserable. He hated trying to fall asleep and he hated waking up, but he _especially_ hated waking up when he didn’t remember going to sleep.

“Mom?” he called, stumbling into the room that comprised both kitchen and living room. He couldn’t remember what day it was. Did he have school?

On the sink, slightly sticky with syrup, there was a note that read, _water shut off again. Please bring up water. Love Mom_

He sighed and pulled his boots on, after digging them out from underneath the table. They were only steel toed army surplus, but he’d added on a bunch of rivets last summer just for the look of it, and he was going to be sorry when the thin spot in the sole finally broke open. He trudged back to the basement door and hit the pull-cord for the light, and then he trudged down the splintering stairs. It was an old house, as far as he could tell—parts of the upstairs were falling apart, but the cellar was probably the same as it had always been. At the side of the water boiler, he bent down and hoisted up the jug underneath the old spigot. The eternal drip had stopped for today, a sure sign that the water had been indeed turned off. He carried it back up the protesting stairs and dropped it off on the counter. Hopefully that would last long enough to do all the hand washing until his mom could pay the water bill off.

Maybe it was Monday. He gave his backpack by the door a speculative glance, and then walked the other way. Fuck it. He wasn’t going. Who was going to miss him? Devi? _Edgar?_ It wasn't like this broken fucking public educational system was going to teach him anything worthwhile.

He plugged his headphones into his walkman and dug out his charcoals. There was still a lot of shading left to do on the wall above his bed, and he felt like getting lost in something for a while.

Humming vaguely along to the overture, Johnny raised his pencil to the snarling face above his pillow and started to get lost.

-x-

Edgar tapped his pencil against the tabletop, deep in thought. Usually it was easy for him to weight two options in the balance of their benefit to him. Things that he wanted usually fell into two categories: those that were in line with what he needed to be, and those that were not. For example, last week he had wanted to shout at his parents when they called to tell him that his father would be going straight to Baltimore for the next two weeks, to help his mother out at her conference. But that would have been fruitless and counterproductive and, more importantly, children do not yell at their parents. A simple conclusion.

Up at the front of the classroom, the teacher was getting an early start on grading their tests. He wasn’t worried about his grade. He was almost certain he’d known 80% of the answers off the bat, and that was satisfactory. What was unsatisfactory was his _personal_ life.

It was becoming clear to him that the amount of time he spent with Jimmy was inversely proportional to Nny’s mood around them both. Edgar knew it was his job to be a sounding board for Nny through this whole thing with Devi, which was the major rock in the stream of their lunch table right now. Once they’d worked that out, Devi would start hanging out with them again, and the correct order of things would be restored. Just having her around changed the whole sense of tension in the air. It was only that Nny wouldn’t talk to him lately, no matter how sideways he tried to come at it. It was like trying to approach a stray in an alleyway.

He hadn’t considered his friend a jealous sort of person before, but he supposed there was something about Jimmy specifically that had set off this deleterious chemical reaction. For the first time in his life, Edgar was stumped on how to resolve a problem. God only knew why, but he liked spending time with Jimmy. He was loath to give up something that he enjoyed just because Nny was being a child about it. But then, wasn’t the older friend owed some kind of compensatory loyalty?

If only there was some way to have them both. If he could just figure out some way to present his friendship with Jimmy as beneficial to Johnny—except that Johnny didn’t think about things in terms of benefits, did he? He thought about things in terms of how they made him feel. And his feelings were always spinning on a dime.

Yesterday Edgar had given Jimmy a ride home, as he’d been doing more and more lately, but before they could reach the car Nny had joined up with them and let himself into the front passenger seat. It had been an uncomfortable ride. If Nny was a cat, his tail would have been twitching while he watched Jimmy in the rear view mirror, eyes narrow and unreadable.

It had been a while since Nny was in a fight on school property. The administration had made it very clear (to Edgar, who had been tasked with escorting Nny home when his mother couldn’t be reached) that the next episode would result in expulsion. Edgar wasn’t sure where you went when you’d been expelled from a school like theirs. Reform school? Military? Either way, he had no desire to find out. But the twitchy way Nny had been watching Jimmy yesterday—Edgar could feel something coming like the dip in barometric pressure before a storm.

He dropped his head onto his chin. Maybe he should just let them fight it out. Only, he didn’t think Jimmy _would_ fight back. He’d just take it, and thank Nny for the pleasure.

It was a very strange sensation, wanting to protect someone. Even more so, when that person didn’t seem to want to be protected.

-x-

Sometime around noon, judging from his stomach, Johnny surfaced from his shading to the sound of the phone ringing again. He froze, pencil to the wall, and just listened for a moment. Could it be them again? Did he _want_ it to be?

Johnny dropped the pencil and leapt off the side of his bed, raced into the kitchen and yanked the phone off the hook. “Hello!” he said.

There was a pause. “…Hello?” the voice said. “Is this Johnny C—”

“Yes,” Johnny snapped. “You’re the lawyer again.”

“Uh,” the voice said. “I do represent—I mean, I’m calling on behalf of Lector and—”

Johnny slumped against the wall, not hearing the rest of the spiel. Okay. Okay. So this was the guy. It was now or never.

“What exactly,” he interrupted, “is it you wanna ask me about?”

Brovitch, on the other end of the line, sounded like he was frantically flipping through his notebook. “Have you—well, I should start by asking, have you experienced any symptoms associated with temporal lobe epilepsy in the past six years? Did these symptoms begin manifesting before or after your—”

“What the fuck is temporal lobe epilepsy?”

“Uh. Seizures lasting half a minute to two minutes, comprised of movement disturbances, numbness, sweating, pain, lack of memory, um, there could also be mood swings and hypergraphia… Some subjects who received the A treatment also report schizophrenic symptoms including hallucinatory episodes, delusions, et cetera…”

Johnny stared at the patch in the plaster in front of him. “What the fuck?” he said.

“If you’ve experienced these or any other abnormalities—” Brovitch’s voice faded out like he was switching the phone from one ear to the other, “—honestly, anything you think is worth mentioning, you’re the only person on record who received so many different trials, our medical advisors have no idea what kind of total effect you might be looking at. To be honest, Johnny, that’s the reason we’ve been trying so hard to get a hold of you. If you could just testify, the whole house of cards would come down around Johnson Products. There’s no way to explain how a single kid could have received so many different trial treatments in such a short amount of time.”

Trial treatments. Johnny stared at the wall, frantically trying to parse this shit. Like when kids with cancer got to take the new pills for free? He was sure he'd seen something like that on a tv show. But he didn't  _have_ cancer.

“But I wasn’t….” Johnny dug his nails into his scalp, not even sure of what he was saying, “I wasn’t a sick kid. Why would I have needed treatment?”

“Well that’s the thing,” Brovitch said. “You’re listed on all the paperwork as having the correct illnesses to be enrolled in the trials, but if you’d _really_ been that sick, pardon me for saying so, I don’t think you would have made it to sixteen. The whole thing reeks of fraud. Several other patients have come forward saying that they were deliberately diagnosed by a physician on the Johnson Products payroll—”

“Stop,” Johnny said, “stop! Okay, I don’t remember any of this. I’ve never even been to a hospital. This can’t be me. There’s lots of other guys with my name, you want one of them.”

“It’s… definitely you, sir. All your information is in here. You don’t remember _any_ of this? This paperwork shows at least five years of sequential trials…”

Johnny squeezed his eyes shut. No matter how hard he pulled it, the reel still faded to white. He couldn't possibly have spent five years in and out of doctor's appointments and not know something about it. Wouldn’t he remember something like that? Wouldn’t his mother have _said_ something about it?

“I don’t remember _anything_ ,” he growled.

“Oh,” Brovitch said. There was the faint sound of a pen clicking. “Okay, let’s mark you down for significant memory loss—”

“Why the fuck would I have been enrolled in this shit if I wasn’t sick?” Johnny demanded.

There was a moment of hesitation, and then Brovitch said, “Well. Many of our clients were offered significant financial compensation for their services. Or for their children’s service.”

“That’s bullshit, my mom wouldn’t whore me out to some pharmaceutical fuckhouse for milk money.”

“Okay, that’s, that’s definitely one way of putting a very delicate situation, but here at Lector and Hassan we try not to lay the blame on the victims, who were usually just trying their best to—”

“My mother wouldn’t do that, _alright_? We might be tight on cash but that shit is off the fucking table.”

“Maybe you should… talk to your mother about this? It seems like I’ve dropped a lot on you.”

“On me? Fuck you! You don’t know anything about me! If you ever call this number again I'll track you down and break your fucking ankles!”

“Uh, okay, got it, we’re in the phone book if you change your mind—”

Johnny slammed the receiver into the wall. Plaster rained to the floor in a shower of white dust. He heard the dial tone as he dropped it back into the stand. What the _fuck_ did Brovitch know about his family? What the fuck did any tie-wearing, latte-drinking, sportscar-driving lawyer _asshole_ know about either of them?

He needed to talk to Edgar. He needed to talk to Edgar _yesterday._

-x-

There was an alley behind the school, for the garbage collectors to drive through every evening, where the kids who had cigarettes went to smoke between classes. Normally it wouldn’t be that hard to bum a cigarette off someone else even if you couldn’t afford a pack of your own, but Jimmy had managed to alienate even the brotherhood of high school alley smokers during the two years he’d been enrolled there. So he just scrounged a couple unfinished butts from the ground and lit those with a stolen zippo. They tasted absolutely rank, but what were you gonna do? It’s just like that sometimes.

Jimmy was in the middle of breathing life back into a piece when the dumpsters gave a low rattle at the end of the alley. He looked up to see Edgar, of all people, picking his way through the litter on the concrete.

“Are you actually going to put that in your mouth?” Edgar asked him, toeing away a can of red bull that had rolled into his path.

Jimmy looked down at the piece, which was already smoking fainting from the relit end. “Waste not want not,” he said, and took a foul tasting drag.

“Unbelievable,” Edgar said.

He settled against the brick beside Jimmy, hands in his khaki pockets, and ignored the smell of freshly relit cigarette. It struck Jimmy as kind of weird to see Edgar between classes. Normally Edgar was the kind of guy who went straight to his next class, sat down, and just waited for the bell to ring. He didn’t like being late for things.

“…You want some?” Jimmy asked, holding out the piece.

“God no,” Edgar said, pleasantly.

They were quiet for a minute more, in the alley behind the gym. Jimmy guessed that it wasn’t all _that_ weird. He did a lot of stuff with Edgar these days. But usually they were _doing_ something, like studying or shopping or driving. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be getting out of just standing here with Edgar, or vice versa. Jimmy lifted the piece to his mouth again and took another breath. It was nice though. Edgar, he meant, not the cigarette. The cigarette was horrible.

“I’ve been thinking,” Edgar said after a while. Beyond them, outside the alley, the bell rang for seventh period. He didn’t seem to notice it.

“You do that a lot,” Jimmy agreed.

“Sometimes, in order to keep what you have, you have to give up on new things that you might like to have,” Edgar said.

Jimmy furrowed his brows. “Like when you want another chicken nugget, but your hands are already full and you know you’ll drop them if you try to grab any more?”

“You grab chicken nuggets with your bare hands?”

“Yeah. Don’t you?”

Edgar just sighed. “I think you’re like one of those disgusting cigarette butts. You’re awful, but here I am smoking you anyway.”

Jimmy looked from the piece in his hand back to Edgar. “Are you trying to start a fight with me, man?”

“Jimmy, I like you,” Edgar said. He smiled, faintly, at nothing in particular. “That’s not a confession, that’s just a fact.”

“Um,” Jimmy said, “you… like me, or you _like_ me, or…”

“But regardless of what I want,” Edgar carried on, ignoring him, “I have to—”

He stopped. His head swung back to the opening of the alley, where a single Styrofoam cup had fallen from the edge of the dumpster. “Hello?” he called, “Is someone there?”

Silence.

Edgar frowned, all business now. He flicked his hand at Jimmy. “You had better put that thing out,” he said.

Jimmy gave him an uncertain look and then took the deepest drag he could manage before stomping out what was left. Edgar strode back to the end of the alley and peered around the corner, but didn’t seem to find anything. He stood there, with his hand on the wall, squinting into the afternoon sunlight as Jimmy meandered over to him.

“So,” Jimmy said, nervously screwing with his earring, “when you said that you like me, is that like, when you said you liked me in the Hot Topic? Or like a different thing?”

“I swear someone was here,” Edgar said. “I hope they aren’t going to report you. You can’t afford to be racking up infractions any more than Nny can.”

Jimmy wished that he hadn’t been smoking something that tasted so awful. He wished he had a mint. “Cause like, if you _did_ like me like that, I wouldn’t tell anybody…”

Edgar gave the walkway before them one last, long look. “We should get to class,” he said. He stepped away without looking at Jimmy, that frown never moving from his features. “We’re already late.”

“…Sure,” Jimmy said, but Edgar was already walking away.

He stood there for a while longer, watching Edgar go. What the fuck was that. What the _fuck_ was that.

-x-

The last period of Devi's day was art, which was good because it was about the only thing that kept her going most days. Thank god she was going to graduate before they cut the funding on that too. When they'd had a theater class she'd done that as well, and when that was gone she'd done chorus for a year, even though she couldn't read sheet music, and now she couldn't do either of those things so she'd enrolled in philosophy to fill her last period with the rest of the weirdos. She used to do marching band to get her physical education credit, which had been alright because she got to see Tenna, but then she hit the pervy flute major with her instrument and she'd been banned ever since.

She'd met Johnny in art class. Freshman year. They designed a mural together. She still has the print rolled up under her bed, a little torn at the corners from where she'd ripped it down after Johnny lost his fucking marbles. Why was it so hard to be friends with people? Every time she thought she could trust somebody, they flipped the fuck out. 

Well. Everybody but Tenna. Tenna was a little crazy all the time, which made her the only trustworthy one.

The project in front of her was an oil painting she'd been putting together for midterms, kind of a collage thing, ripped lace and foil and stuff. The more she worked on it, the more she felt like it was reflecting something ugly back at her. Something sad.

When the bell rang she stopped and rubbed the heel of her hand into her eye, feeling scratchy and exhausted. She missed the old days, before the lonely lunches and the fear. She hated being afraid. It always sucked to be afraid, though even at sixteen she'd resigned herself to a little bit of fear, just being a girl in the world that she lived in. But being afraid of someone she had liked--still did like, even, if you could like someone and be furiously resentful of them at the same time--was just insult on top of injury.

Devi put away her things, and then she went to look for Edgar.

She found him in the parking lot, against the hood of his car, flipping through a graded test. There was no sign of that sophomore kid who'd been tagging along the last couple months, and no sign of Johnny either, which he guessed she was grateful for. Except she was also in the mood to give him a piece of her mind.

"Hey," she said. "Can I talk to you real quick?"

Edgar looked up from his paper, and maybe it was something about the way his attention flickered on, but she got the impression he hadn't really been looking at that test. He gave her a faint smile. "What's on your mind?" he said.

Devi sat down next to him, on the hood of the minivan. The whole thing groaned and clunked under their combined weight. 

"I'm gonna cut the bullshit here. We both know something is wrong with Johnny, right?"

"Only one thing in particular?"

Devi sighed through her nose. "The mood swings. Him fucking trying to strangle me in the middle of a perfectly nice study date. That's not just part of his zany misanthropic charm, alright?"

"I know," Edgar said. His faint smile died. "There's a lot going on right now." 

"I want things to go back to the way they were," Devi said, restlessly tapping her nails on the hood. "I want to be friends with you guys again."

"I wish I could make that happen," Edgar said. "He won't talk to me lately. I don't know what I can do about any of it."

Devi turned to him, lips pulling back in a grimace. "You know what your problem is, Vargas? You never  _do_ anything. You just watch people and shake your head and pretend like it's none of your business."

"I'm sorry," Edgar said, "you think _I_ can fix this?"

"I think you've been enabling him for years," Devi said, "because you like watching him come apart. You like it when he needs you."

Edgar slowly closed his test and set it down on the hood beside him. For a half-second Devi hesitated—Edgar was her friend too—but then she remembered how afraid she’d been the day that it happened, how angry she’d been ever since, how angry she still was. That day was just the whole disgusting pustule coming to a head underneath them. The problem had been festering for a lot longer, and Edgar had just watched it. Just like she’d just watched it, because it hadn’t affected her, until it had. When it had just been strangers and assholes in the line of fire, it hadn’t seemed so important.

“You’ve got to put your foot down,” Devi told him, jamming a finger in his direction. “I put my foot down. It’s time for you to take some responsibility too.”

Edgar looked at her. He sat as ramrod straight as he ever did, hands folded neatly in his lap, but he seemed tired all at once. In the reflection of his glasses, the sun slid behind a cloud.

“It’s not my place,” he said. “I’ve never tried to tell him what to do.”

“Oh, bull _shit_ ,” Devi said. “I’ve seen you point him like a dog on a leash when you wanted to.”

Edgar frowned. “That’s an unflattering simplification,” he said.

This time, she jabbed her finger straight into his chest. He winced. “Johnny’s not your only friend, Vargas. We’re your friends too, or at least I thought we were.”

“Of course you are,” he said, rubbing at his clavicle.

“You draw the line. You tell him you’re not gonna put up with his shit anymore. If he’ll snap on me, who the fuck do you think is next, Vargas? If you won’t protect the rest of us—if you won’t protect us, I don’t think you’re anybody’s friend. Not his, and certainly not mine.”

“That’s not going to change what he is, Devi.” Edgar held open his hands, pleading. “I can’t just change what he is by disapproving of it.”

Devi pushed off the car, arms crossed tightly over her chest. It was getting colder, as the year waned and the sunsets came earlier each evening. Even in Sunny California, it was getting cold.

“We have to start somewhere,” she said. “I don’t know, we’ll take up a collection to get him help or something, whatever we have to do, but that’s tomorrow’s problem. Today’s problem is you, putting your _goddamn_ foot down. You get me?”

Edgar’s expression didn’t flicker. “I get you,” he said.

“Good,” Devi said. “Where the _fuck_ is he? Doesn’t he ride home with you?”

“Not lately,” Edgar said. “I wasn’t kidding when I said he hasn’t been talking to me much. I have no idea where he is.”

Devi snarled and kicked at a red solo cup someone had already run over. It skittered across the concrete and hid behind a sagging Ford truck. She turned and stalked away, stinging hands buried in her pockets for warmth.

“You better make a move,” she said, letting the wind carry it over her shoulder, “before it’s too late.”

Tenna would still be in the band room. She’d catch a ride home with her, and pretend that her life wasn’t a complete clusterfuck for a couple hours. Christ. At least stupid people didn’t know that they were miserable. She envied that.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey you guys wanna hear a [song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M68OvVKRCK0)

Jimmy could barely tell what was going on in his seventh period civics class on a good day, but today he basically floated through it. What the fuck. What the fuck? What the _fuck_. While the teacher was handing out quizzes, he was thinking about that time at the Hot Topic changing room. While the projector was clicking from slide to slide, he was thinking about that night he’d stayed at Edgar’s house. He felt like he’d never left the alley behind the gym.

He wished he’d had a mint. He wished he’d tried to kiss Edgar.

The whole idea made his mouth go dry. He imagined what it would be like to kiss Edgar—would he taste like something? Would he make noises? Now that the idea was in his mind, he couldn’t understand how it had never occurred to him before. Every time he'd leaned closer for no real reason, every time he threw an arm around Edgar’s shoulders and squished their faces together, was Edgar thinking—Did Edgar think he—

Jimmy floated out of seventh period in a daze. Holy shit, he liked guys. He meant, he knew that he had thought about what it might be like to touch Johnny before, like… maybe what it would be like to patch him up after a rough fight, or sleep next to him in a hideout somewhere. Maybe he’d had fantasies about Johnny having sex, but it had always been sort of… he’d never imagined _himself_ there. Holy shit.

So what, did he like _two_ guys? An hour ago he’d thought he didn’t like _any._

He passed Tenna on the stairwell and gave her an absentminded wave as she spotted him. She tugged her backpack tighter around her shoulder and hopped down the last couple steps to catch up with him.

“You look concussed,” she said brightly. “Did you try to pick a fight with Anne again?”

“No,” Jimmy said, and then, “why? Did she mention me?”

“Yeah like Anne talks to me. Seriously, are you okay? You just passed Mr. Roberts and you didn’t even flip him off.”

Jimmy did a double take, but he was too slow. Roberts was gone. He snapped his fingers irritably.

“You need a ride home, bud?” Tenna asked.

Jimmy shook his head, half to say no and half just trying to clear it. “I’m gonna walk it off,” he said.

Tenna patted his shoulder. “Look twice on the crosswalk,” she said, and then she broke off for the band room.

Jimmy watched her go, stumped for a moment. So, if how he felt about Tenna was how you felt about a regular friend, how did he feel about…

At the door to the parking lot exit, there was a shadow wedged into the corner of the hall. As he looked up from the floor, deep in thought, their eyes met, and it was like a wrecking ball swinging through a rickety house, like a hammer through drywall. All at once, his mind was clear of everything but one thought.

“Hey,” Johnny said, watching him intently from his slump behind the door.

“Uh,” Jimmy licked his lips, “hey, Johnny.”

Johnny hadn’t blinked since he’d been standing there. “Would you like to walk home with me?” he said.

“Yes!” Jimmy said, nearly tripping in his haste to get there faster. “I mean, yeah, hell yeah, if you want to.”

Johnny pushed off the wall and held the door open for Jimmy, who skittered through under the auspices of Jimmy’s spindly hand. Johnny was all made up of gangle, but he was graceful in a way that other kids just weren’t. He made holding a door open look like a moment from a painting. Real elegant.

Jimmy squeezed the straps of his bag as Johnny fell into step beside him, bookless and bagless and hands tucked into pockets. He wondered what Johnny’s house was like on the inside. He’d seen the neighborhood before, back when he used to follow Johnny around to be closer to him, but he’d never seen through the windows. The shutters were always down. It looked kind of rickety from the outside—maybe it was nicer on the inside? Or maybe it was totally spooky. He wouldn’t put it past Johnny to live in a full on haunted house, that would be _so_ metal.

“I knew you were starting to warm up to me,” Jimmy chattered, as they jaywalked into the neighborhood across the street. “I knew it was just a matter of time, but you’d come around!”

“Did you,” Johnny said.

“Oh sure,” Jimmy said. “How could you not! I mean, look at us, we’re meant to be.”

Johnny said nothing. He just kept on walking, speeding up a little. Jimmy rushed to catch up with him, his mouth tripping over itself to fill the empty spot in the conversation. Johnny probably just had a long day. That was fine, he could talk enough for both of them! And the more he talked, the less he had to think about things.

They left one neighborhood and passed into another, and Jimmy talked about the most recent infraction he’d been written up for, then about Anne Gwish, and then about how to make a pipe bomb, which he was fairly sure he’d worked out from some surfing he’d done on the web last week at the library before the librarian noticed where he was going. The quality of houses started to deteriorate as they went. The last of the trees for a long way disappeared behind them.

“Not to fish for compliments or anything,” Jimmy said, “but how come you wanted to have me over today?”

Johnny’s steel toed boots made a scraping sound on the sidewalk as it abruptly ended, leaving only asphalt. “You’ve really wormed your way in, haven’t you?”

“I guess!” Jimmy said. Come to think of it, while he wasn’t paying attention, he’d made two whole friends, and now even Johnny was finally warming up to him. All that work was finally paying off!

“Like a parasite,” Johnny said. “Like a worm in a cow’s stomach, sucking all the life out of it.”

“Is that your house?” Jimmy said, squinting into the sunlight. It seemed saggier than the last time he saw it.

“Yes,” Johnny said.

Jimmy thrilled with excitement. He trotted a little ways up a head and then turned around, walking backwards to keep Johnny in his line of sight. “You’re not gonna regret this,” he said, “I have _so_ many plans for us.”

“What a coincidence,” Johnny said, looking past him. “So do I.”

“I could show you the pipe bomb thing!” Jimmy said. “I haven’t tried it out yet, but you could help me. I bet between the two of us it’ll be a snap!”

“Grab that,” Johnny said, glancing to a length of garden piping someone had left in their front yard, among the crisp wrappers and the upside down Tupperware.

“Oh, shit, good thinking! Although I think you’re supposed to use PVC pipe? But it probably works either way.”

Johnny led the way up to his house and unlocked the door. Jimmy ducked through, taking in everything as fast as he could. Definitely on the spookier side. The wallpaper was peeling yellow from the walls, and the floor was just board, bare and scuffed. There were some cute magnets on the fridge though. Someone had spelled out “piggy” in cartoony magnetic letters. Jimmy hid a snort behind his hand.

“Here,” Johnny said, delicately tugging the strap of Jimmy’s backpack. “I’ll take that.”

Jimmy’s heart skipped just from the near-touch. He quickly disentangled himself from the straps and let Johnny pull it the rest of the way into his hands, at which point he dumped it by the stacked bookcase and seemed to forget about it.

“Like a worm,” he mused, or seemed to, making a beeline for the refrigerator. “Want a yahoo?”

“Uh, sure.”

Jimmy bounced on his toes, in the middle of the floor, as Johnny pulled a couple of juiceboxes out of the fridge. God, he was here, wasn’t he? He was here! That was Johnny’s lamp, and that was Johnny’s fridge, and this was Johnny’s yahoo that he was offering Jimmy with his real, actual hands. How many times had he imagined this moment? Usually with a different beverage though.

“I’ve been thinking,” Johnny said, “about when everything changed around here. And going back over the last couple months, over every moment that didn’t go the way I thought it was going to, the thing they all have in common is you.”

Jimmy took a sip of his drink. “Yeah?”

“Edgar seems to like you,” Johnny said. “Edgar seems to like you a _lot_ , doesn’t he, Jimmy?”

For a moment, not even the novelty of being inside Johnny’s real life house could stop the recollection—the alley, Edgar’s faint smile, the taste of second hand smoke on his tongue. And then he was back in the present. He slurped his drink uncertainly.

“And I was thinking,” Johnny went on, “how ignoring that change hasn’t made the change go away. You’re still here. I was thinking that maybe it was time to face that change head on.”

Jimmy brightened. “So you _are_ coming around.”

“Jimmy,” the older boy said, tilting his head, “would you like to see something cool?”

“Definitely!”

“Hand me that pipe, will you please?”

Jimmy offered the pipe out. Johnny took it carefully from his hand and, testing the weight of it once in his palm, hefted it and swung it like a crack of lightning, and then all Jimmy knew was darkness.

-x-

Darkness has qualities. There’s red darkness and black darkness, cool darkness and hot darkness. Jimmy came to in a haze of red darkness, head swimming, and opened his eyes to the distant swinging light of a bare, overhead bulb. He groaned.

“You think you can _fucking_ have it all,” someone was saying, hissing, somewhere above him. As his brain gradually caught up with his ears, he thought—Johnny. He’d know Johnny’s voice anywhere.

There was a sudden pressure against his chest, and it came to him like a puzzle piece shaken loose out of a box. It took him a moment to realize the pressure was a human hand, and a moment longer to realize that the human body connected to it was Johnny’s, perched over his abdomen, not quite touching him. His knees were tucked underneath him like a cat’s, one hand steadied for balance against Jimmy’s chest.

“You think you’re _entitled_ ,” Johnny’s voice said, somewhere above Jimmy’s ear.

Everything was coming to Jimmy in bits and pieces. Was he drunk? Had he got into his dad’s Jack again? Fuck, he was gonna get the _shit_ beat out of him when his dad came home. Was that why his head hurt? Had he already got the shit beat out of him? He reached for his head and found his fingers came away wet.

“It’s not enough for you,” Johnny’s voice said, growing thicker with something that Jimmy couldn’t parse—some kind of intensity, some kind of emotion. “You want me too, I _know_ you do, you’re not satisfied with just taking all my things—you want me to _love_ you for it!”

Jimmy squinted up at the figure over him. He heard the word _love_ in a mess of other words and thought, _that’s right, wasn’t I thinking something about that before?_ Maybe that was why he’d gotten drunk. The single drifting bulb lit up the air behind Johnny’s head like a halo. Against the harsh light, his whole face was lost in shadow. Jimmy wanted him. Was that what Johnny had just said? The words were catching up with him in chunks, in pieces. Jimmy wanted him. Yeah, that must be right, because Jimmy _did_ want him—Jimmy wanted him a lot.

Jimmy wet his lips. “What’s,” he said. “Are we,” he said.

Johnny, crouched over him, leaned in closer. “You want my attention, Jimmy?”

“Yes,” Jimmy croaked, too dazed to do anything but pour himself out, to lay himself open.

“Alright,” Johnny said. “You have it.”

And then he closed his hands over Jimmy’s windpipe and _squeezed_.

-x-

Edgar waited in the parking lot for a while longer. He checked his watch a couple times, as the minutes slid by. It was odd for Jimmy to flake on him. Nny could be up to anything anywhere, but Jimmy was usually dogged about following up the smallest breadcrumb of interest from another person. Normally you couldn’t _make_ him go away.

Something sat uneasy in his gut. It was the conversation with Devi, he thought. For the second time today, he was uncertain where to go from here. All of it was muddled, all the interpersonal grey areas that no code of conduct or moral short hand could account for.

Finally, when he was the last car left parked in the junior bowl, he sighed and climbed into his car. He’d go see Johnny. Devi was right, he needed to have a talk with his friend. And if Nny wouldn’t come to him, like he used to, Edgar would just have to go to him.

Over the course of their friendship, they had mostly hung out at Edgar’s place, but Edgar still certainly knew the way to Johnny’s house. He took the usual streets and pulled up along the curb in his usual place, and locked the minivan behind him when he got out. It seemed like it had gotten worse around here, since the last time Edgar really stopped and looked at it. There was a spot in the roof that _had_ to be leaking. Not for the first time, Edgar felt a stab of helplessness at the totality of it all. He was just a kid too. What could he do about something like this?

Edgar hit the door in just the right spot, and the lock popped open for him. He let himself into the house, knowing that Johnny’s mother wouldn’t be home until sometime in the early morning on a week day like this. “Nny,” he called. “Are you home yet?”

There was no reply. Edgar moved a little further into the darkness, stopping when his foot hit something heavy in the walkway. He bent down and lifted up the bag he’d bought for Jimmy, with the caution tape all tied around the buckles for a little of what Jimmy considered _style_. Edgar’s mind skittered and jumped forward. Jimmy’s bag shouldn’t be here. He thought of the barometric feeling, the cat-hungry way Nny had watched the rear view mirror, and without quite knowing what he was afraid of, Edgar’s stomach knotted with dread.

His eyes skated over the bedroom door and came to a stop over the way to the cellar. It was just a hunch, but—

Edgar pushed open the door, and descended into the screaming darkness.

By the light of the bulb, it was scene out of a nightmare Edgar would never have been creative enough to dream up. The body thrashing and wriggling under Johnny was exactly the one he had been most afraid to see. Johnny was muttering in a frantic pitch that wound higher and higher into incomprehensible mania as Jimmy frantically pried at the hands around his throat, dust stirred up thick into the air around them, both their faces pulled back into wracked hysteria—

For the fraction of a moment, dumbly, Edgar thought of that first early conversation he’d had with Jimmy, the casual comment at the lunch table. _Maybe he’ll kill one of us. Maybe it’ll be me._ But it wasn’t him, after all, and the reality—the reality—

Edgar flew down the steps so fast he was falling more than running. He dove into the chaos and wedged his arm between the two of them, throwing everything he could into the push. Johnny finally came free with a scream, rolling back into the water boiler shoulder-first. Edgar dragged Jimmy back, panting, and checked to make sure he hadn’t stopped breathing somewhere in the middle of all that. He seemed fine, if dazed.

Across the floor, Johnny was picking himself back up, eyes wild and empty, fingers scrambling at the floor. Edgar didn’t know what to do. He’d never been in a fight in his life—he was the type to use words, or failing at that, other people to resolve a conflict. If Johnny clotheslined him, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to get up again.

“Johnny!” he said sharply. “Johnny, snap out of it!”

Johnny bared his teeth. “I’m gonna remove it,” he panted, “I’m gonna remove it, I’m taking it out, you’ll see, things will go back to the way they were—”

“Remove _what?”_ Edgar snapped. “Jimmy is a person, not a, a, _thing_.”

“He’s taking you away from me,” Johnny snarled. “Right now! That smug little fucker! On the floor of _my basement_ and he has the balls to steal _my_ bestest friend, I’m gonna put him out of all of our misery!”

Johnny lunged, boots scrabbling in the dirt, and all Edgar could think to do was throw himself forward, catching Johnny under the arms, knocking them both to the floor. He disengaged as fast as he could, puling himself back up to his feet for the next interception, but all Johnny did was skitter backwards, glaring bloody murder.

“Johnny,” Edgar said, taking deep breaths (in through the nose, out through the mouth, in, out-), “I am about to truly lose my temper with you.”

“Get out of the _way_ ,” Johnny said.

Edgar stomped across the floor and dropped to his knees in front of Johnny. He pointed two fingers at his own eyes. “Look at me,” he said. “Jimmy is not the problem here. _You_ are the problem. _This_ is the problem.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

What Edgar would have really liked to do was reach out and grab Johnny by the face, but he knew Johnny well enough to know his friend didn’t like being touched even on good days. Instead, he held out his open palms, trying to convey something conciliatory.

“You’re my best friend, and I love you, but you need to calm the _hell_ down before you do something that you’ll regret.”

Johnny still was breathing his heavy, angry breaths, but he didn’t make any other move to push through.

“Devi wasn’t happy with you for a _long_ time before Jimmy showed up,” Edgar said. “And I knew that, and I put off talking to you about it, and for that I take my share of responsibility. But this is not how you’re going to solve a problem you caused by doing the same thing to someone else.”

Bit by bit, Johnny’s breathing was starting to slow. “I didn’t mean to hurt Devi,” he said. “I just—I was so anxious, and there was this noise that wouldn’t _stop_ , and I just wanted everything to be quiet for a minute—”

“Okay,” Edgar said. “Okay. But you know you really messed her up, right?”

“I guess,” Johnny said, miserably. “I didn’t mean it.”

“I don’t think that matters.”

Johnny gave him a look of absolute desperation. Where there had been a furious animal moments before, there was only a child now. “She’s leaving us,” he said. “I can’t let you leave too.”

“You _are_ still my friend, Johnny. Nobody is taking me away from you. Am I coming through here?” Edgar risked reaching out at last, putting a hand over his friend’s shoulder. Johnny shuddered, but didn’t shake him off.

Edgar risked a glance over his shoulder, at the place where Jimmy was curled up against the staircase. Earlier today he’d been ready to cut ties with one person to keep another. In retrospect, he’d made this sacrifice before, again and again, each time Johnny decided he didn’t like some change in their lives. It had seemed like the only way to keep what he had. Edgar turned back to Johnny.

“But,” he said, steeling himself, “this is where I’m drawing the line. Jimmy is my friend too. If you want to kill him, you’ll have to go through me.”

Johnny didn’t say anything. He was looking through the floor at something only he could see, trembling slightly.

“Were you actually going to kill him?” Edgar whispered, ducking in closer.

“I think so,” Johnny said. “I don’t know.”

“You’ve got to know that’s too far,” Edgar said. “You can’t just _kill_ people you don’t like.”

“I guess,” Johnny said.

Edgar sighed and stood up. As usual, he was the only one around here with a head on his shoulders. “Come on,” he said, offering Johnny a hand up. “Let’s get you out of this place. I’ll make some coco.”

He pulled Johnny to his feet. One hand under Johnny’s arm, he offered a hand down to where Jimmy was curled up, staring at the blood drying on his fingers. Jimmy looked up at him, not quite catching on.

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to,” Edgar told him, “but I’ll make some coco for you too, if you want. I think we all need a breather.”

After a moment, Jimmy reached up and let himself be pulled to his feet. Doing his best to balance the two boys slumped against either side of him, Edgar walked them all up the stairs out of the basement and into the light. He sat both of them down on the sofa, wrapped them in a couple of blankets, and went about making cups of hot chocolate from the last three scoops Johnny’s mother had left in the tin.

Could they afford to take Jimmy to the hospital? Edgar sighed. While the water was boiling, he went and dug out the old first aid kit from above the fridge. They were low on bactine. Go figure.

On the couch, Jimmy had fallen asleep slumped against Johnny’s side, burrowed into a forgotten comforter. Johnny just watched the silent telephone like a man in a dream. Edgar pushed a mug into Johnny’s hands, sat down on the coffee table, and started to apply bactine to a wad of paper towel.

 _God_ , he thought, _what a day_.

-x-

“Thanks for coming home early,” Edgar said, holding out the ibuprofen bottle.

Johnny's mother flicked off the flashlight she had been shining in Jimmy’s eyes. She was a small woman, in her hospital scrubs and her flat shoes, with a perpetual look of exhaustion around her eyes. Edgar knew that she was young, but she seemed a lot older. At some point in her life, someone had taken a chunk out of her left ear, and Edgar had often wondered how to ask about it without being rude. She sighed and creaked to her feet, plucking the pill bottle from Edgar’s hand.

“You’re sure he can’t go to the hospital?” she said. “It’s definitely a concussion. He needs a real doctor.”

Edgar shook his head. “He doesn’t have insurance. And I’m not sure exactly what he means, but he keeps saying something about his dad. He won’t go. “

She reached down and took Jimmy’s hand in her own, pressing a couple of round red pills into his palm. “Take these, mijo,” she said. “I’ll get you some ice.”

She shuffled across the room and dug into the freezer, pulling out something that was probably a ziplock full of frozen spaghetti sauce. As she passed the shut door to Johnny’s room, her expression pinched.

“He needs to stay home for the next couple of days,” she said, addressing Edgar without looking at him. “If the headaches get worse, he needs to go to the ER right away, insurance or no insurance. If he does absolutely _nothing_ until the symptoms go away, he should be back to normal in time.”

Edgar took the frozen ziplock from her and brought it back over to Jimmy, holding it gently against the younger boy’s forehead. Jimmy mumbled something but didn’t pull away. Past the edge of the drawn shades, the color of the evening sunlight was going red.

“You said it was with a _pipe?_ ” Johnny’s mother said. She had slumped against the edge of the sink, which Edgar had found out the hard way wasn’t working.

“That’s what I found,” Edgar said. He’d left it in the basement, not sure how best to dispose of it.

She rubbed her temple. “Thank god he only hit him in the forehead. It’s a miracle that boy is doing as well as he is.”

“He was blessed with a hard head,” Edgar remarked, brushing a stray lock of hair away from the site of injury. “Ma’am, if you don’t mind me asking, does Johnson Products mean anything to you personally?”

Johnny’s mother just kept looking at the door to her son’s room. “You answered the phone, didn’t you?”

“Not me. Johnny may have.” Edgar’s hand was starting to go numb, but he didn’t let go. “He got to ranting about it before you came home. He said—well, I’m not sure if I should believe him, given the state he’s in…”

She folded her arms across her stomach, holding her sides. “You have to understand, Nny _was_ sick a lot as a toddler. He had asthmatic bronchitis, he was always coughing, it just about broke my heart. I thought I was going to lose him. One of my professors said she knew a group that was trial testing something better than the market standard, and she pulled some strings—it worked so well that by the time he was out of kindergarten you’d never know he’d been sick—and then I was trying to get my degree while I was working in a gas station and… I hope you never have to experience anything like that, Edgar, but it wasn’t great.”

Edgar flexed his stinging hand. “Lector and Hassan say they’re working on a series of class action lawsuits for malpractice, fraud, and possibly importing illegal chemicals.”

Johnny’s mother narrowed her eyes. “You _did_ answer the phone.”

“No, I made a call. I was worried. Johnny said you sold him to some pharmaceutical pedophile ring.”

She snorted. “He’s such a drama queen. A couple years after the bronchitis cleared up, one of Johnson’s reps called us up and offered us a place in some of their placebo testing groups. That money paid for his appendicitis, you know.” She added, a little louder now, “That money paid for his charcoal sets too!”

Edgar frowned. “I don’t think those were placebo groups,” he said.

She looked sharply back at him. “Why would they bother testing real medicine on someone who didn’t have the illness they were trying to treat? That doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

Edgar frowned a little more deeply. He hated it when Johnny’s mother cussed at him. Parents were supposed to be held to a higher standard than teenagers.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I think you should talk to those lawyers, Ma’am. For Johnny’s sake, if nothing else.”

“I’m telling you,” she said, “they were only placebo trials.”

Edgar counted to three under his breath, trying to keep his temper. “It would make Johnny feel better,” he said, “if you could show him proof.”

She made an irritable sound, but she didn’t say no out and out. She busied herself at the sink, carefully rationing spoonfuls of water from the big jug to wash out the coco mugs from earlier. Edgar felt a little twinge of guilt for making a mess.

“How are you doing down there?” he asked Jimmy, quietly, taking away the frozen ziplock for long enough to shake some feeling back into his hand.

Jimmy made some unintelligible noise of reply.

There were times when Edgar had been accused of being heartless. Sometimes he’d even agreed. But days like today—days like today reminded him that for however competent and clinical he tried to be, he was still a kid. He could still be afraid. He didn’t like it.

“Are you angry with me?” he asked.

For a minute, Jimmy didn’t seem to have heard him. Then, at last, he reached up and put a hand over Edgar’s, squinting uncertainly at the floor between them.

“I dunno,” he said. “What’d you do?”

If this was low grade amnesia from the concussion, Edgar didn’t even know where to start. He was a little disappointed with himself for how much he didn’t want to try.

Jimmy looked up. One of his eyes was squeezed shut in pain, but the other one was startlingly clear. He gave Edgar a hard look, the hardest look Edgar had ever seen on him, as if all the bluster and willful optimism that usually softened him up had been stripped away. Edgar’s very real heart immediately sank. Oh, Jimmy definitely remembered. He held his breath.

“Nobody’s ever taken a hit for me before,” Jimmy said.

The breath whooshed out of Edgar in startled confusion. “O-oh?”

Jimmy just kept giving him that piercing look. “That was cool of you, man,” he said. And then, in the exact same tone, “We should make out.”

Edgar couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing, clutching his hand over his mouth, and kept on laughing until his eyes starting to water.

“Fuck, jeeze, you coulda just said no,” Jimmy whined.

Edgar thought he was probably crying now, with all the water that was coming down his cheeks, but that was okay this one time. Jimmy wouldn’t tell anyone. Jimmy probably wouldn’t even notice. He put out a hand and patted Jimmy’s knee, not actually sure what he was trying to communicate.

“It would be my pleasure,” he managed, between hysterical breaths. “Ask me when you’re not concussed.”

Visibly nonplussed but not quite willing to ask, Jimmy only said, “Okay.”

-x-

The last day of midterms left the hallways of the whole high school weirdly cavernous and a little ghostly, as the last few kids who turned in their take-home essays early drifted off and disappeared into the mysterious private curriculum of the holidays. There was no snow, in this part of the country, but everything seemed a little more brittle, a little quieter. Johnny sat on the edge of the bus ramp, drinking a slushee he’d bought from the gas station across the road when he left the testing room half an hour earlier than the rest of the class. He was trying his hardest not to get into a screaming match with any of the teachers this coming semester, and it was easier to do that if he fucked off early and didn’t fixate on how he _knew_ for a fact Columbus sailed in 1492 and he wasn’t gonna bubble in the wrong answer just because the text book said otherwise.

He took an aggressively deep slurp of the slushee. Fuck, not yelling at people was _really hard_.

He didn’t see it so much as feel it when Jimmy came up to the ramp and leaned back beside him, sucking on the straw of his own gas station slushee. They stayed like that for a long time, watching the traffic, making hollow sounds on their plastic straws.

“You’re a fucking asshole,” Jimmy said, after a while.

Johnny made a contemplative sucking sound.

“I had to make up three tests in one day because Edgar wouldn’t let me miss them and your mom wouldn’t let me go to school.”

Across the street, someone had thrown their papers into the street in a fit of pique. Some couple dozen white sheets rained down on the speeding traffic like oversized snowflakes.

“Sorry I tried to kill you,” Johnny said. “I might have overreacted slightly.”

Someone had chalked an elaborate cartoon depicting a rabbit's suicide into the asphalt of the principal’s parking spot, in a cheerful yellow. Johnny was trying to remember if that had been him. He thought it might.

“You know I always had this cool badass image of you,” Jimmy said, “ever since elementary school. I thought you were this, like, tortured artist with all these irons in the fire. Like you were gonna go down in a blaze of glory and show everybody what was up. But it turns out you’re just kind of fucked up.”

Johnny shrugged in general agreement.

Without really looking at him, Jimmy held out his drink. “Mine’s blue flavor,” he said. “You want some?”

“I’d rather cut out my tongue than touch your spit,” Johnny said, “but thanks for the offer.”

“Your loss,” Jimmy said. He finished off the rest of it by himself.

When he’d scooped out the last of his slushee with his bare fingers like an animal, Jimmy asked, “You have therapy after this?” 

Johnny flattened his lips together, not thirsty anymore. “Yeah,” he said.

“You want me to take the bus?” Jimmy said, with a tension in his voice that even Johnny noticed.

Johnny glanced over to him, and found him staring hard at the ground, paper cup crushed in his hand. “Why?” he said.

“So you and Edgar can drive alone,” he said. “Duh.”

For the first time in this whole conversation, Johnny was actually taken aback. He watched the play of light on his boots as clouds whipped past the sun, not quite comfortable looking any more at Jimmy. He’d had to psych himself up an awful lot to do what he’d done—even now he was having trouble picking apart the things he’d told himself from the reality he'd returned to. It was exhausting.

Even now he had the vertigo-uncomfortable feeling that he’d nearly crossed a line there wouldn’t be any coming back from. There were moments where the only thing holding him together was the fact that he _hadn’t_ gone through with it. All other things aside, Jimmy's hard physical presence was a grounding force. 

When Edgar came around the corner, he had just enough time to lift a hand in an attempt at a _Hey_ before Jimmy was off the bus ramp, paper cup forgotten on the ground. He leapt at Edgar, who just barely managed to keep from tipping over backwards onto the concrete and picking up a matching head injury.

“Jimmy, please, I just talked to you this morning,” Edgar said, staggering backwards.

“On the phone,” Jimmy said, “like a fucking military wife. I wanna touch your face, hold the fuck up for a second.”

Edgar sighed and spun them back around, planting Jimmy firmly on the ground. He looked up, grinning despite it all, and paused as his gaze fell on Johnny. Johnny lifted his hand, straw in mouth.

“Hey,” Edgar said, expression going more guarded and calculating, his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder tightening. “Are you ready to head out?”

Johnny considered him for a moment. Despite not being family in any way shape or form, it was Edgar who had spent the last week on the phone with various therapists throughout the city, combing through the legion of assholes out there so Johnny wouldn’t have to. It was Edgar who had convinced his mother to call the lawyer and finally talk about the class action lawsuit, which it turned out was worth a _lot_ of money. It was Edgar who had driven him to his previous appointment, who had sat him down with Devi, who had listened to him cry at four in the morning because everything was too much and he felt like a glitching robot, smoking and spinning his little robot wheels.

Johnny knew he was fucked up. He didn’t have much going for him. He’d always thought that Edgar was something he’d have to fight to keep, that one day something strong enough or attractive enough would come along, and he’d have to bite the bullet or lose him forever. He was still trying to figure out what fucking reality he was in, that he’d failed even that and somehow Edgar was still here.

He got down, stopping to drop his cup off in the garbage can because liter is fucking unacceptable under any circumstances. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m ready.”

He started walking towards the parking lot, not waiting for anyone to catch up. He pulled the walkman from his coat pocket and held it up, flashing it in the uncertain sunlight.

“I’ll take the back seat,” he said. “You never play any music 'cause you’re a fucking pod-person, and I’m not gonna sit in silence for half an hour when I’m about to see fucking Phyllis and her wall full of PHDs.”

As he shoved the walkman back into his pocket, he called back, like an afterthought (which it was not), “Jimmy, you can take shotgun if you really want it.”


End file.
